


do i wake or sleep?

by cainight



Category: Berserk
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Fix-It, Hallucinations, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Eclipse, Slow Burn, Torture, except its like kind of more sad lol
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-27 18:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13254225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cainight/pseuds/cainight
Summary: “Until now, you have been a dream called Griffith. And when that dream ends, you will awaken into a dream from which you’ll never wake in a night that will never break.”Griffith has two dreams. Even when he is reborn as Femto, and his frozen heart is shoved deep into the abyss, one dream will always eclipse the other.





	1. prologue, part one: clipped wings.

The mind is its own place, and in itself  
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.

\- _Paradise Lost_ , John Milton

 

The last time Griffith feels sun on his cheeks, it’s with cold steel pressed against his throat and yesterday’s rain-soaked clothes sticking to his sides. He’s surrounded by guards on all fronts, and with no sword to defend himself, he has no choice but to surrender quietly. It’s not, after all, as if any of this matters anyway. Nothing matters now.

When he’s shoved down stairs and into a prison cell, shirt stripped and hands tied up above his head, he’s silent. Even when the bite of the whip splits the skin of his stomach he doesn’t make a sound, just keeps his eyes trained on the ground, mind replaying the image that haunted him: Guts’ broad back retreating into the morning sun, eclipsing the light and leaving Griffith in the dark. He loathed the memory, and the raw hollows of his chest ached when he thought of Guts, out in the world, and himself, beaten and bruised, flung helpless against the dripping stone floor of his prison like a rag doll.

Griffith doesn’t even notice the king is speaking to him until he cries out, “Warmth… only warmth can protect me in this world!”

 _What an idiot_ , Griffith thinks. Warmth cannot protect someone - it can only tear them apart. Even a breath can smother and kill the heat of a flame, and once one has grown used to the warmth, its absence feels even colder than before. Griffith knows better than anyone.

The king lashes him like it could undo what Griffith’s done, like it could win him the favour of his daughter. Griffith had seen the look in the king’s eyes when his gaze rested on Charlotte, had heard the doting in his voice when he spoke of his princess. Perhaps Griffith should feel disgusted, but all his chest teems with is numbness.

Blood trickles into his eyes, down his cheeks, through the lacerations in his ruined pants. Griffith stares the king dead on and scowls at him, this lonely, pathetic man who had thousands at his bidding yet was brought down to a shaking, cursing mess by his daughter sleeping with another man. To think that someone like this was lecturing him was insulting.

The door creaks shut as the king leaves. Griffith slumps into the pile of hay underneath him. His hair is matted with sweat, and the swelling where his wrists had rubbed tender against the shackles shot dull pain up to his elbows.

So this is the way everything ends - his goals, his dreams, his life.

How worthless.

* * *

A slap to the face wakes him up, and when he opens his eyes, he finds himself looking into the face of a disfigured man - his torturer. He lisps and drool spills from his split lips as he looks Griffith up and down like a slab of meat. There’s a pair of rusted scissors in his hands; the blades veer up to Griffith’s cheek and he jolts away on instinct, drawing a dry laugh from the torturer.

“Heh, what’re you so scared for? Not gonna hurt you… yet. Saving the best for last,” the man slurs yanking a strand of Griffith’s hair down on the last syllable.

With a deafening snip, a long, white ringlet is severed, and Griffith watches as it falls to the ground, dyed dark by the muddy water puddling below. It’s not long before all the rest has joined it, and the torturer’s guffaw echoes through the desolate cell as he leaves with Griffith’s hair clumped in his hands, promising to return later.

Griffith reaches up, groping blindly at his scalp, and draws a shuddering breath when he realizes it’s all gone. Being whipped bloody is one thing, but being stripped naked, sheared, and left to slither in the dark with rats is another matter entirely.

They want to humiliate him.

Knees curled up to his chest and body shaking against the creeping cold, Griffith closes his eyes. On the verge of unconsciousness, he swears he hears the heavy thump of boots pacing in the corner.

* * *

 All feeling in his fingers is lost. Needles are stuck under his nails, hot wax poured over the thin skin of his joints, and his right pinky bent back so far he can feel bone pierce through flesh when he tries to move it.

The torturer wanted to go slow with him, he’d said. Trying to measure time is a fruitless endeavour in this place of rot, but it feels like weeks have passed and the torturer isn’t even done with his work on Griffith’s hands.

Griffith slinks back into the darkness when the torturer leaves, relieved even for this moment of quiet. When the torturer is here, Griffith thinks only of maintaining his composure, of stifling his suffering - he refuses to scream or cry. But when he’s left to himself like this, his thoughts always slip back to the same thing.

Guts. Where is he? Is he even still alive? Pangs of worry marred by hate fill Griffith, only to be overcome by crushing regret, and it hurts more than anything the torturer could ever do to him.

It’s this, only the amalgam of emotion that surges through him when he thinks of Guts, that keeps him from giving up and smashing his head in against the rubble strewn about. Griffith is no blind optimist - he knows that even if he were to escape, his campaign to the throne can never succeed, not with this ruined body and blackened reputation.

Warm breath halts Griffith’s frantic thinking as it smooths down his neck, his shoulders. Griffith twists his tired limbs to look into the space behind him, for the source of the sensation, yet nothing’s there. When he huddles up against the wall, the breathing starts again, now puffing out against his back.

“Hello?” he calls, softly. Silence peers back at him.

The warmth spreads down, wrapping around his hands. “Who’s there?” Griffith asks, but doesn’t yank away. No answer.

There’s something familiar in the touch. If he closes his eyes, Griffith can almost feel calloused fingers curling over his own, and instead of fear or paranoia, calm pierces through the echelons of his mind until he’s lulled to sleep. He dreams of dark hair and dark eyes and a dark voice swirling through the air, slipping through his grasp when he grabs for it.

* * *

 It’s been an eternity since the door's opened. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, throat clenched with thirst, and his stomach growls for food that won’t come. Griffith is starting to wonder if the king’s called off his earlier order and instead sentenced Griffith to starve to death here, undignified, forgotten, and alone.  

There’s a fluttering of air as he feels something move to sit down beside him. Griffith sighs, and leans his head against its shoulder, bruised cheek nestling into the folds of fabric outlining a bicep that isn’t really there.

The more pain he feels, the closer to death he gets, the stronger these hallucinations grow, as though his brain is desperately holding onto this one last piece of illusory comfort to keep itself from falling into insanity. Then again, Griffith’s not so sure he’s not insane already. He may have lost his mind long ago.

Griffith has never seen this figure of his hallucinations, only feels the movements it makes, the warmth it imparts when it touches him, and hears the soft rhythm of its breathing. Nonetheless, he thinks he knows who it’s supposed to be.

* * *

 

A gurgling sputter and pink foam pour from his lips, watching the torturer feed thread through his cut-out tongue and dangle it in front of him. Nails jam into the muscle, raw meat squeezed between fingers, soft as a sponge. Black spots swarm his vision. A thunderous throbbing in his skull overtakes him and his eyes roll back and he’s rendered useless, useless.

“My most precious… best in all my collection…” the torturer’s words flicker in and out with Griffith too busy listening to the last part of his mind that wasn’t broken telling him to cough, spit the blood up before he chokes on it, to pay attention.

“Imagine all the things you could say to me if you still had this…" The tongue twitches. “Doesn’t it look good? If I spiced this up and fed it to you, you wouldn’t even know it was yours, huh?”

Puke cuts through the blood in Griffith’s mouth and splatters the cobblestone.

When the torturer leaves and Griffith settles back into his home in the shadows, he sticks his fingers into his mouth and cries when he feels the raw, cut muscle there, remembers the taste of metal as the razor bumped against his teeth. Sobbing hurts, and screaming does, too, so he just lies there tracing his gums, the emptiness in his mouth where his tongue should be.

A nose presses against Griffith’s temples, nudging him up, and he leans his weight back onto the broad chest of the figure settling in behind him. Griffith wishes it would talk to him, tell him he would be okay, but it’s only a delusion, a dream, so it says nothing.

* * *

 Griffith collapses, chest heaving. The deep gash in his wrist spurts gore, and his legs can’t even hold him up with their slashed tendons. Horror and shock skews his synapses, ripping from him a scream.

The torturer’s eyes are on him, relishing in this reaction he managed to pull from his prisoner. In a clumsy thrash of elbows and knees Griffith tries to pull himself up, slipping in his own blood and crashing back down, hitting his head.

Red drips onto his thigh from his hands, wet and sticky, and he’s trembling all over, bent-double, white-knuckled. As the door slams shut and takes the light out with it, Griffith whimpers at the sight of bone peeking through the flesh of his arm.

He hopes he bleeds out. He hopes he dies here, in this reeking cage of vomit and sulfur. He has nothing to lose now, not even his dignity. They’ve taken everything from him - his future, his voice, his freedom. There’s nothing left for him to do but die.

The world spins around him and Griffith feels numbness seep into his veins, shooting ice towards his heart and since when was the cell so _freezing?_

A phantom palm cups his cheek, warmth flooding back into him at the contact, and when he wakes hours later, he’s surprised to find his heart still beating.

* * *

 There’s only so much pain one can feel before it all starts to blur together. He can no longer feel his body; he’s just a suspension in air, an unbearable lightness. Sight, smell, taste, touch - all atrophied, save for when the hallucination visits him and breathes life back into the fathomless void that comprises his thoughts when the torturer is gone.

The hallucination… he still isn’t able to admit to himself who it is he imagines holding him, stroking his hair, but who else could it be? How ironic it was that the person who ruined him, abandoned him in the snow that day and reduced him to this, was the only thing keeping him alive.

Most prisoners dream of being on the outside. Griffith dreams of being in the exact same place, just with Guts. He doesn’t know why.

Griffith can’t move his head, the heavy helmet latched over his face too much for his feeble neck to bare, so he has no choice but to lie face down, forehead half-submerged in a murky puddle left by the dripping ceiling, sinking downwards into sleep.

* * *

 The door creaks open, but Griffith doesn’t wake. There’s no reason to. The torturer will shake him and jab at his sides until he opens his eyes, and Griffith wants to savor every moment of peace he gets before the agony begins all over again.

Arms slot around his waist, lifting his head from the puddle. He tilts toward it, shameless in this needy desire for the warmth the hallucination always brings. Not like it matters much, considering none of this is real.

“Stay back!” a voice yells, rough at the edges. “Get the hell away!”

Griffith’s eyes snap open, wide and confused. Light has filled the room, torches and lanterns all crowding around, blinding him. He looks up.

Guts is cradling him, teeth gritted as he looked into the ruins of Griffith’s face, the blank pinpoints of his pupils, ringed by bloodshot red. A stammering _'aa-ah'_ bursts from Griffith’s lungs as the panic sets in.

The hallucination shouldn’t be able to speak, and Griffith shouldn’t be able to see it.

_Guts._

“This can’t be… Griffith…”

Hearing Guts - the real Guts, here, with him - say his name knocks the wind out of Griffith. Emotions explode inside of him, fear blending with jealousy, hope with ire, warring against each other like crashing waves on a black shore. The sharp edge of Guts' betrayal swells in his gut, his spectral-thin fingers quaking with anger.

Guts has no right to save him when it was his leaving that put Griffith here in the first place. This isn't a wrong he can right anymore. Griffith is ruined forever, and it's all Guts' fault. Yet still that tiny prickle of dying light burns on in Griffith's chest, digging deeper into him as he stares into Guts' eyes. Even after being abandoned and broken and betrayed, that most foolish part of him wants to cry out in relief at seeing Guts again. That he wouldn't die here, in this tiny pocket of hell, with his final memory of Guts only his turned back in the snow, moving further and further away. Though he wants to hate Guts, it feels like an aborted motion, and he's left hating himself instead.

There’s nothing else he can do, nothing he can say with no tongue to form words, so Griffith reaches a hand up to Guts’ throat, weak grip scrabbling for purchase.

When Guts left, Griffith endeavored to smother all hope that Guts would return, fearing his own weakness. With anyone else, Griffith can lie, hide behind masks, be cold and calculating, but with Guts, Griffith always loses his composure. To sever that bond and break himself free of the chains that tethered him to Guts is the only way to harden that soft spot in his heart. Griffith knows he isn't strong enough.

Guts holds him close, hot tears streaming down his face and onto the mask Griffith is trapped inside, and, as if purely by instinct, Griffith’s hand falls and clutches Guts’.

This is the first time Griffith has seen Guts cry. His own throat tightens up at the sight.

The rest is, to him, little more than sound and flashing light. Guts drives his sword through the torturer, flings him off the edge of the winding stairwell, but Griffith is barely watching the excess movement and purpose. His eyes are only on Guts.

Worn fabric wraps around him - Guts’ cape, he recognizes it - and he’s pulled up onto Pippin’s back. He watches as Guts slashes through the guards blocking the entrance, casts aside soldiers in his way, clears the courtyard with dread swoops of his blade. Griffith’s eyes never leave him, as though scared that if he looks away, the delusion will splinter and he’ll wake to find himself back in that tower, alone.

 


	2. prologue, part two: last chance.

From a pyre on the burning ghat  
a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.  
As if remembering something important.  
As if to look around one more time.  
As if he has something at last to say.  
As if there might be a way out of this.

\- “Lazarus in Varanasi,” Joseph Stroud

 

“Ugh, fuck!” Guts hisses, fists balling into the sheets of the makeshift bed as Casca tugs the needle through the tear on his shoulder blade.

The harsh _bump-bump_ , _bump-bump_ of the wagon jostles Griffith, matching the pace of his heartbeat. They had to break past the border by sundown if they were to escape the full scope of the King's guards, Casca had said, and wasting time by stopping to make camp and rest would likely prove fatal. Even from here, Griffith can hear the harsh pants of the horses, overworked and overtired. 

“Don’t move, you’re making my hands shake,” Casca replies, eyebrows furrowed.

“Well, it fucking hurts!”

"Maybe if you'd taken a second to come up with a plan before you ran into that barrage of guards and gotten stabbed, I wouldn't have to stitch your stupid shoulder up! Do you never _think_?"

Everything feels as it once was - the banter, the bickering, the whispers of the men around him filled with hope, sure that with Griffith back, all would be well - yet there’s something missing. Conversations happen around him, not with him, and both Guts and Casca look at him warily when they think he doesn't notice. Griffith is a spectator in his own life, looking without seeing, hearing without speaking.

“You’re stronger than a year ago, but you still never know when to back off. Swinging your sword without your brain, just like you’ve always done,” Casca murmurs. “If you’re dead, everything is over… try to get that through your thick skull.”

Guts huffs, indignant, “if you’re scared of dying, why even fight in the first place?”

Casca's lower lip trembles and her eyes fill with concern. “If you die, you'll leave so many people behind... You don't even care, do you? Fine, then… just go ahead and die!”

Griffith feels an ugly twist in his chest, snake scales slipping over themselves in a winding knot, the same he felt when he watched her sponge the blood off of Guts' cheeks after battle and speak with him in tones too low for Griffith to hear. What had happened between them in his absence? When did they begin to push him aside and replace him with each other?

Judeau finishes wrapping Griffith's bony hand, securing the bandages in a knot before standing to leave with Casca. She glares at Guts, tosses the curtain aside to jump out of the wagon, then stops as though she's almost forgotten something.

“Welcome back,” she tells Griffith, not meeting his eyes. It’s hard to feel welcomed when every thought in his mind focuses on this new otherness, of having to observe from the outside, forced into passivity.

The _bump-bump, bump_ _-bump_ of the wagon is amplified by the ensuing silence. Griffith is still watching Guts. His eyes have never left him since the tower.

“It’s just like last time, huh?” Guts asks as he falls into bed with a huff. “With Zodd. We both got pretty messed up back then, but we survived.”

There’s an involuntary wince that comes with hearing the word “we” coming from Guts’ mouth, and Griffith isn’t stupid enough to think then and now were in any way the same. He and Guts had taken on Zodd together, fighting as partners. Today, Griffith could only sit by and watch, his pathetic body too weak to allow him even the freedom of running or holding a sword as hordes of soldiers piled on Guts.

Griffith’s still as trapped as he was in the tower; the only difference is the scenery.

“Aren’t you hot with that mask on? You can take it off, it’s just me here. It’s okay.”

Griffith’s eyes meet Guts through the holes in the mask, holding back a heavy sigh. How could Guts say things like this to him after what he’d done? How could he abandon Griffith in the snow then tell him “it’s okay”? The damage has already been dealt - it’s too late for any of this. Griffith can’t let Guts see how vile and repulsive he’s become. To show Guts weakness again would only jam the knife deeper in his chest when Guts inevitably grows disgusted by him again and leaves once more, and Griffith can’t handle that, not a second time. There’s still pain where Guts stabbed him in the back, and Griffith doesn’t forget easily.

A shake of the head is what Griffith gives in reply. In this moment, he’s almost thankful for his lack of voice, as it keeps Guts from expecting an explanation that Griffith isn’t prepared to give.

“Let’s get some rest - it’s been a long day,” Guts reaches over Griffith for the pile of blankets and for a moment in time, a split second, Griffith is back in that godforsaken tower with the heat of that hallucination crowding around him, rocking him to sleep. The real Guts, of course, would never want to do that, Griffith knows, so he stays on his own side of the bed and doesn't dare move closer.

Griffith is so skeletal that the measly body heat he can strike up is squandered by the omnipresent chill he feels down to his marrow. There’s no hiding the pity on Guts’ face when he tucks Griffith in, and Griffith is torn between irritation and relief that at least Guts is here to feel anything for him at all.

A year of passing out on cold stone and piss-soaked hay makes the burlap sack under his head feel like a luxury, and it’s barely a minute before Griffith’s breathing evens into the closest thing to calm he can get as he begins to dream.

 

* * *

 

They don’t look him in the eye anymore. Nobody looks at him but Guts, who just stares - unblinking, unfeeling, dead.

It’s been three days.

When Griffith blinks he sees the blur of Guts falling to the ground, clutching his chest, that sick, wet cough spewing gore from his lungs onto the snow, stained on the backs of his eyelids.

There’s really nothing like holding someone in your arms and watching the life burn out of their eyes. Griffith never felt closer to Guts than he did clutching his hand, dry sobs wracking his body as Guts gritted his teeth against the impenetrable black and slipped away from him.

Now, Griffith sits vigil over Guts’ body. Pippin and the others who could bear it had carried Guts in and laid him on Griffith’s bed - not like Griffith would need it; sleep avoids him just like the rest of them.

At least he and Guts were alone.

Griffith spent the first night labouring over how to arrange Guts’ body while he struggled to remember how to breathe. He closed Guts’ eyes to pretend he was sleeping - just sleeping, not lost forever, not extinguished by Griffith’s hand - and that worked to ease his guilt somewhat, until he looked at the gaping wound over Guts’ ribcage and the illusion was shattered.

There’s a voice in Griffith’s head that asks _was it worth it?_ and Griffith can’t answer because he knows having Guts like this is better than not having him at all.

The second night, Griffith tucked Guts’ head into his lap, drawing his fingers down the cool slant of Guts cheek, and watched Guts until his eyes ached in their sockets. Casca and Judeau told him through the locked door that they needed to get rid of the body soon, that if Griffith stayed with it, he might grow ill. Griffith said nothing but trembled with rage for hours at the fact that they didn’t even call him Guts anymore, just ‘the body.’

He keeps thinking of Antony and Cleopatra, Alexander and Hephaestion, Hadrian and Antinous, and wonders if he’s supposed to die here with Guts, too. He’s read of rituals where the wives of warriors throw themselves upon the pyres of their husbands and collapse their ashes together. What did they think, if anything at all, before they offered themselves as a sacrifice?

It’s been three days now, and Griffith hasn’t left the room, has barely even left Guts’ side on the bed.

Tonight, he sponges the blackened blood from Guts’ forehead, brushes through the sweat and grime in Guts’ hair. Keeping Guts clean and safe is the only comfort Griffith has.

His fingers shake as they ghost over Guts’ eyebrows, down his closed eyes, the soft curve of his eyelashes and the dip in the bridge of his nose. Griffith thinks he sees Guts’ lips part in phantom breath, but it’s only his imagination. There’s a part of him that believes, perhaps desperately, if he stays with Guts and sews regret into his every movement, Guts will come back.

“Do you hate me?”

Griffith feels Guts’ cracked palms, bitten with frost and stiff, the skin pale as a moth’s wing, limpid, and the veins scored underneath like tributaries off where his heart should be but instead harbored a hole, a hole where Griffith’s blade had run him through.

The night is cold and curls over Griffith’s shoulders, turning his shaky sobs to furling puffs of fog as his forehead falls into Guts’ neck.

Cold tears on his face and a limp hand in his - this is all Guts has left him.

Griffith watches Guts rot into the bed sheets until only a stain remains, outlining the place where his body lay.

 

* * *

 

A gargle fails to grasp hold of sound in Griffith’s throat as he wakes with a start, knocking his head against the inside of his helmet so hard that the world goes blurry. Beside him, Guts doesn’t stir, and Griffith has to watch him to make sure he’s breathing before the anxiety gripping his limbs is soothed.

It’s been a small eternity since Griffith’s had a nightmare. In the tower, he didn’t dream at all, the horror of his waking life too tangible for his mind to conjure anything worse in sleep. Griffith is not an incredibly superstitious person - he believes what he can experience and perceive with his human senses, and accepts the possibility of forces outside his realm of perception - but he’s heard many nights men say that nightmares are warnings from the subconscious, logical premonitions, and he’s never dreamed of Guts dying before. He prays it means nothing.

Moonlight leeches the healthy colour from Guts’ cheeks, and Griffith can’t help the associative allusion he makes to corpses. Even in sleep, the restlessness that defines Guts doesn’t fade, and he tosses his arm behind him, fingers twitching as he gives a quiet grunt. Despite himself, Griffith smiles.

“ _Prince… our prince…_ ” a litany of voices whisper, like wind in grass, everywhere and nowhere at once.

“ _The time is almost come… the feast is nigh… you crawl on your belly now, but still you are a god among the men…_ ”

Griffith tried to call out, to ask what they meant, but all that croaked through his ruined vocal chords was a string of disjointed vowels. The buzz of flies wings echo in his ears and he feels squirming on his arms, his legs, like maggots probing the filleted skin.

“ _Remember us… when you are one of them… when the fated four become five..._ ” beetles pour into the wagon, over the white blankets, the smell of death and decay flooding every dark corner. Pupil-less eyes stare at him from the penumbra of his own shadow.

“ _Remember us… remember us… remember..._ ”

The words fade into the night and the multifoliate eyes blink closed, leaving him breathless in the dark.

He remembers Guts’ earlier words - _it’s just like last time, huh? With Zodd. We both got pretty messed up back then_. Except there’s no “we”, it’s just him, just Griffith. Why do these things always happen to him? The behelit, then Zodd, now this. Why always him?

The voices called him prince and a god among the men, but what did any of that mean? Was he going crazy, like he'd feared in the tower? Or was he still in the tower, imagining all of this?

Griffith tries to say Guts’ name, but only manages a weak “ _tss_.”

He lies there, still, until dawn breaks over the horizon and Guts opens his eyes with a yawn, asking, “did you sleep well?”

 

* * *

 

 

In the morning, Guts exits the wagon and Casca enters, as though switching shifts to watch over him. They’re careful to treat him with the same respect as before, but still seem reluctant to leave him alone, like he might just shrivel up and die if they turn their backs.

Casca feeds him mushed up peas and fatty ham cut small enough for him to swallow. He only gets half of it down before the shame makes him nauseous and Casca can hardly look him in the eye any longer.

Then she leaves, too, sparing him a last glance before closing the flaps of the wagon behind her, and he catches tears prickling at the corners of her eyes.

The worst part of being a puppet with its strings cut isn’t the brokenness Griffith feels, but the disappointment of everyone around him. As their leader, he led them from poverty to the castle, the highest troops of the Midland army. Now, he’d made them no better than a thieving band of ex-mercenaries, all because of his own irrational choices spawned from Guts leaving.

And, he thinks, isn’t that what it all comes down to? Guts had been standing at every precipice Griffith stumbled over, there to push him off the edge and catch him just as quickly. When Guts fought Zodd, Griffith was ready to die for him, and even after being abandoned by Guts, Griffith would risk his life again for him. Guts was the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of everything Griffith could possibly feel. How could someone who makes him so happy also throw him into such deep despair?

Casca returns to change his bandages, and she rambles about the men and the progress they’re making toward the border to fill the silence. He can tell she’s hiding something from him, her and Guts both. He almost doesn’t want to know what it is.

Guts joins her outside the wagon as she leaves, and she smothers her head against his chest as she begins to cry.

“Is Griffith… okay?” Guts asks, eyebrows furrowed.

“Y-yeah. He should be sleeping now,” Casca nods, rubbing her cheeks with a gloved hand.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing…”

“Well then what are you crying for? Did something happen to Griffith?” Guts seizes her by the arms, voice rising to a near-yell.

Casca drops to her knees, as though her legs have been pulled out under her.

“I-I can’t leave with you. Griffith… he’s so small, and he trembles so much. I can’t leave him.”

Griffith's eyes widen, somehow still surprised to hear Guts is leaving him again. Of course. He should have known.

“I’ll stay too,” Guts sighs, head bowed.

“You said so yourself: you fight your own battles now. You still haven't found your own dream. Don’t you remember what Griffith said?"

Guts flinches at that, and Griffith struggles to think of what she could mean. 

“If you’re Griffith’s friend… you have to leave. You can’t stay here. You must go alone.”

Griffith gasps for breath soundlessly and his heart tramples his ribcage in terrified staccato. He can’t handle Guts abandoning him - whatever pieces were left of him would crumble, and after getting it all back, Griffith would have to lose everything again.

A painful wrenching knocks the breath from Griffith’s lungs. He flops his dying body up onto the drivers seat and grips the reins of the horses in both hands, lashing blindly at them to speed the wagon forward, away from here, until he wakes from his frenzy to soaked bandages and a snapped elbow, waist-deep in a darkening lake.

Despondent, desperate laughter rips out of his lips, wondering at just how low he's sunk. He should have died in that tower, or that day Guts left him. It would have been so easy, to move his head just a little to the left - Guts sword would have blown clean through him, and he wouldn’t ever have had to live this long or feel this hopeless.

If he would just die, all of this would be over. The sadness, the guilt, the indignity, it would wane until he couldn’t feel anything anymore, and then, maybe, he would have peace again. Dreams end in death - Griffith wants to wake up from this nightmare.

A nudging at his hand begs his attention downward, where in the murky water swims a stone pendant with the contorted face of a man. After all this time… the behelit?

His thumb hooks the plain thread and draws it up, wet sheen glistening in the sun. He can still remember the woman who gave this to him; she’d said the behelit only found its way to those destined to hold great power over the destiny of the world. If only she could see him now - a crippled, invalid shell of a human who could barely feed himself.

Stupid old woman. He has no power over anything.

He is completely, utterly useless.

“Griffith!”

His heart sinks as he hears Guts’ voice, the pounding of his boots drawing near as he splashes into the water.

 _Stay away! Don’t touch me!_ Griffith cries without noise, his mutilated tongue flailing miserably in his empty jaw.

A vast shadow blots out the sun high in the sky, and as gloom descends over the shimmering water, figures begin to flicker out of the fog.

Griffith thrashes against the water, trying to run, to hide, do anything to escape Guts. He can’t handle being touched by him, not if he’s going to leave. If Guts touches him now, Griffith will never forgive him.

Guts’ hand grasps the thin bone of Griffith’s shoulder, eyes wide in fear.

The behelit opens its gaping mouth, and screams.

  
  



	3. mea culpa.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live  
        My very life again though cold in death:  
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give  
        Pulse for pulse, breath for breath.

\- "Echo", Christina Rossetti

 

A valley of skulls erupts from the ground, the slope where their gaunt cheeks meet noses cupping the shallow water of the lake as he and Guts are swallowed by a flood of crimson light.

“What the hell…” Guts trails off, caging his body around Griffith as he looks behind him to Casca. It’s only then Griffith realizes that the Band of the Hawk, horses and all, have found themselves trapped here, too.

“We were riding through a field, weren’t we..?”

“What is this place…”

“Is this a dream?”

The mercenaries murmurs grow to panicked shouts, each asking the other what had happened, how they came to be here. Even the horses whinny in confusion, stamping their feet and rearing at the commotion.

“Everyone, shut up!” Casca yells, her voice betraying her uncertainty, though the men still listen. “Don’t fear what you don’t understand, just get into formation - don’t stray from the group!”

What few moments of order she manages dissolves as a rumbling shakes the barren rocks, stirring deep beneath.

Like a shark fin rising from the water, slowly the face of a woman takes shape in one of the skulls - pale white skin, turquoise hair, bloodshot red-rimmed eyes deep set under crooked lashes - and the rest of her body follows, towering over the Band of the Hawk with a smug smirk. Wings sprout from her shoulder blades and cast long shadows down the nose of the skull she’s perched on.

The men scream, draw their swords, try to run, but it’s pointless, and soon two others have joined the woman, all amusedly watching the humans below as if they were in on a joke.

“This has to be a dream… we’re all just stuck in a bad dream, right?” Griffith hears someone murmur. He knows better than to think likewise.

Last night in the wagon, it felt the same as this - unreal yet impossible to deny. Then, eyes had blinked out at him from the night, speaking in unison to him, reverent and prayerful, but these creatures only stared in anticipation. Waiting.

The black sun high in the sky bleeds down, black sludge finding the form of a cloak laying over a half-rotten corpse with its eyes stitched shut and the skin around its mouth pulled back by hooks piercing the exposed coils of its bloated brain. Griffith feels a shiver rip through him, the same he felt when in the castle’s silent library faced with books dating to antiquity.

He is in the presence of something very, very old.

“The time has come,” the corpse announces, and whether through sheer power of presence or something else entirely, all falls silent.

A skeletal finger lifts from underneath that Stygian cloak, pointing at Griffith. “You, the chosen one, here, now, and everywhere, appointed by God’s own hand… our kinsman. Our blessed king of longing.”

When the voices in the wagon spoke, they told of a “fated four” - was this it? Griffith can’t seem to stop shaking.

Guts watches him worriedly, arm warm on his waist. He draws his knife from his belt and points it at the four figures, glaring. “This is bullshit!” Guts yells. “Kinsman, chosen one… keep your stupid crap to yourself! Griffith’s not one of you!”

Griffith wants to tell Guts to stop, that if he insults these things, they might hurt him, but all he can say is “ _ahh-ah_.” Guts tilts his head, not understanding, and Griffith can’t stop the frustration from overwhelming him. He can no longer wield a sword, stand on his own, or even warn Guts. How is Griffith supposed to protect him?

In response to Guts, the figures laugh, full-bellied and deep.

“What a beautiful friendship!” The woman exclaims, arms crossing over her chest, “He’ll make such an _excellent_ sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice?” Guts’ eyebrows furrow, turning to look at Griffith, as though Griffith might have answers.

“Yes… you must be sacrificed for him to become one of us. It is his destiny, and yours. From the moment you crossed paths with him, fate marked you his. Every decision that led both of you here was predetermined by divine providence, and now that the eclipse has come, you will become fodder for the realization of his dream.”

Griffith’s breathing is ragged. No, he doesn’t want that, he doesn’t want to sacrifice Guts, even if it was his destiny, as the woman said. He couldn’t -

“You’re all gathered here as an offering for the birth of an angel. Your deaths will give him new life… it is his choosing.”

The Band of the Hawk stare at their leader as though they’ve never seen him before.

Guts gnashes his teeth, biting back fear and doubt, “No… Griffith would never-”

The corpse sighs, and although its jaws never move, it still replies, “Your life is woven tightly with his. You are inseparable. The laws of fate cannot, and will not, be changed. That is all.”

A broken groan echoes off the red horizon and the ground shakes underfoot, pushing Griffith and Guts up, away from the others.

“Don’t worry,” Guts whispers to him, digging his fingers into Griffith’s side, “I’ll get us out of here. We’ll be fine.”

The words are barely out before Guts foots slips in the edge of a bloodied skull. Griffith reaches out to catch him, the weight snapping the half-crushed bone in his elbow where he’d fallen in the lake, but he tries not to grimace, for Guts’ sake.

Guts sees through him too well. He eyes the swelling wound in Griffith’s arm with growing horror and, knowing it was him who caused it, lets go.

The stone becomes hand, cupping Griffith in its palm, and the four angels greet him with smiles as he falls to his knees, too weak to support himself.

“Why are you afraid? Is it because you know we are more powerful than you, or because you can no longer ignore the evil you’ve known to be in you all along?” The corpse drones, “There’s no point in hiding it. Here, let us show you who you are.”

Griffith coughs up spit and vomit, throat dry, shaking his head against the images that run across his mind - a glowing castle, bodies beneath his feet, the ghosts of soldiers who gave their lives to him only to watch him throw their self-sacrifice away by ruining himself.

If he gave up now, their lives would go to waste. All the people who died for his dream, all he killed and let kill, would be in vain. Their deaths would be meaningless.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” The woman asks. “This is who you truly are.”

There’s no point in apologizing to the dead. They knew what joining his ranks meant, and he knew just as well that the path he took to the castle could only be built on the backs of others. The only way he could truly honour their deaths was to bring the dream they died for to life. It was the only thing he could do for anyone now, with this shattered body and decaying mind.

“Griffith!”

Guts’ scream tolls Griffith back to himself, but just like in the tower, Guts has come too late.

The sight of Guts makes Griffith sigh, then smile. Even after everything, Guts had the power to stop Griffith in his tracks, to throw him off, if only for a moment.

Among everyone Griffith has fought with or against, the thousands of comrades and the thousands of enemies, nobody else made Griffith feel this way. Nobody else could ever be as polarizing, as important to him.

Only Guts.

The warmth of Guts’ hand clutching at him - his shoulder, his wrist, his waist - and a blur of words, mixed confusion and anger, at the four figures towering over them - these are the last things Griffith remembers of being human. All at once there is too much sound, too much sensation, then he is dragged into numbness.

* * *

The stone fist closes over Griffith’s tiny form, and Guts thinks of a dead bird being crushed in the violent hands of a child. Panic sets in as he stabs at the unrelenting fingers, chest heaving, “Hang on, Griffith - I’m coming to save you!”

Guts flinches at the sudden burning in his neck, sharp slices of a forming brand engraving itself into his skin, singing through the nerves.

Howls pierce the gawking cavern, and from hundreds of feet above, Guts can see the Band of the Hawk fall. Legs stick out from the drooling mouths of monsters, eyes bulge from their sockets, hanging from disconnected optic nerves that disappear under heavy feet, and the whole world is washed in blood of every hue.

Guts draws a gulping breath, driving the blade between two fingers, “Just wait! I’ll get you outta there soon!”

The cries for help below begin to fade as Guts’ comrades are picked off, what was left of their bodies submerged in the lake of blood, waves lapping against the hand that reaches up into the sky with Griffith held tight in its grasp.

Is this what Griffith wanted all along?

* * *

 

“Sweet dreams, blessed child…”

Griffith blinks his eyes open but there’s nothing to see but endless darkness. The light deceives him, drawing further away, dropping him slowly down. He can no longer feel his body, just a cold whisper against his skin.

“Until now, you have been a dream called Griffith. And when that dream ends, you will awaken into a dream from which you’ll never wake, in a night that will never break.”

Dreams - that’s all Griffith was, wasn’t he? Strip him down to the bones and all you would see is dreams, fragments of desire, at his core. He was a slave to his dreams. And when others saw the intensity of his devotion to his ambitions, they were left changed, for better or worse, flocking to him or despising him. In the eyes of others, he was barely even a person, just an idea.

Images flash before his eyes - skulls cracked open like melons, toothless gums crying in pain - and he recognizes the faces of his men amid the slaughter outside the safety of this frozen, senseless tomb.

He wished for this, he brought this upon them, yet… his heart doesn’t ache. There’s no shame, disgust, or fear.

He feels hollow inside.

A puddle comes into view, stretching wide through the black, as a pinprick falls from the light above. It melts into the pool, sending ripples through the calm water.

_Look, the crystallization of your last tear shed… when suffering so profound as to make someone rip himself apart is confronted, a heart is frozen._

The words seem to reverberate in his head, sourceless, soundless.

“My heart is frozen?” His voice sounds so small in comparison.

_Yes. You will feel no hatred, or sorrow, or happiness. There is nothing to guide you but your dream, now. No more distractions. You have been freed from yourself._

To live without suffering, at the expense of the suffering of those who trusted him… Griffith should feel angry with himself for his selfishness, but all he feels is relieved. For too long, his emotions dictated his actions. When Guts left him, he ruined everything trying to comfort himself. He watched his dream be ripped to shreds and abandoned in the shadowy corners of that tower. Even once he was saved, he still foolishly pined after Guts, not learning his lesson.

He will never be that weak again.

* * *

Jaws clamp down on his shoulder. There’s no time to even feel it sting; he’s whirling around, impaling the eye of a demon with his knife until he hears a _pop._ The steel snaps as the creature bays in agony and rips away, collapsing against the side of the transmuted arm.

“I’ll come back, I promise,” Guts says to the closed fist cocooning Griffith.

He jumps, whole body wobbling from the impact when he lands on the demon’s forehead. What’s left of his dagger carves between its ears, unearthing the long, crystalline horn there as Guts plunges into the blood of his friends.

A glove lacking a hand, empty boots, and scavenged rib cages bubble up beside him, as though attracted to the warmth of something still alive. Guts feels terror cloud his vision.

“Is anyone… isn’t anyone..?” The words die in his throat. “Judeau! Corkus! Pippin! Is anyone out there?!”

Hushed pants of apostles serve as the only reply.

“C-captain?”

Gaston limps up, his arm torn from its socket and face pale. Guts catches him as his legs give out, pressing a hand against his shoulder to try and slow the bleeding, and asks, “where is everyone? What happened?”

“I don’t know. I was runnin’ away from those things, then next thing I know, everyone’s gone. Captain… what the hell’s going on here?” Blood gurgles against Gaston’s tongue, “None of it seems real… it’s like - like we’re stuck in a dream someone’s having.”

“Shut up! Stop talking, you gotta save your strength!”

Gaston doesn’t listen, just keeps going, “Maybe the Band of the Hawk itself was just a dream. It’s so grand for a regular guy like me. Whenever I’d wake up after the victory parties, I’d feel so sad.. Like I knew it was gonna get ripped away from me. Griffith, too… something’s off about him. He’s not… he was like someone out of a fairy tale. Heh… Guess in this fairy tale, I’m just a minor character.”

“Stop it, Gaston, I told you already! We can’t let this place -”

Gaston’s face explodes in a Molotov cocktail of skin and bone painting Guts’ face red.

Guts staggers back, stumbling over desecrated corpses as the monsters surround him. A shadow hovers over his head before the body of Casca is thrown at his feet. Her limbs are bent at sickly angles, slick innards bursting from her stomach and Guts knows that if he reaches down to touch her, she’ll still be warm, soaked in the slime of rot settling in.

He can’t cry - crying would mean hope, and hope doesn’t exist here - so he opens his jaw and wails wordlessly.

The monsters douse him in hot breath, moaning to each other in language indecipherable as they eye Guts up, licking their teeth hungrily.

A voice booms on the horizon, “The birth of the fifth blessed king, of our brother, Femto.”

Atop the hand outstretched toward the heavens, a pair of wings unfurl against the backdrop of a flaming sky. Guts makes a move to stand but there is a ripping agony in his arm, tearing at his bicep, sending flares of white hot heat to the backsides of his eyelids. He struggles against it, screaming as the tendons of his arm are forced too far from their center point and his limb vanishes into the mouth of a one-eyed devil.

There’s a whoosh of air that blows his sweaty hair onto his forehead, and two clawed, leathery feet touch the blood-shod rocks. Eyes meet Guts from the shadow of a hawkish helmet, mimicry of the one Griffith had refused to take off in front of him in the wagon.

“Griff-” a roar of pain steals the name from his mouth as he’s shoved nose-first into the ground. Griffith draws near, eyes only for him, ignoring the praising monsters circled round.

He halts when Casca’s body blocks his path, breaking his stare away from Guts to glance dispassionately down at her, as though she’s a stranger. Guts wants to see a flicker of regret, or any emotion at all, but all Griffith does is survey her wounds like he’s inspecting a stranger on the battlefield, then look back to Guts.

Guts is petrified. He squeezes his eyes shut, as if when he reopens them, he might awaken in the wagon to find this was nothing more than a dream. Instead, when he blinks back into the world of death and fire, he sees a claw piercing into his pupil, weight on his back blocking his desperate thrashing as he’s blinded. Griffith is still watching, detached, uncaring.

Is he going to die here, too?

The black sun cracks and crumbles as the front hooves of a horse beat through the glass. Sunlight streams from the interstices in the firmament, and a skull in knight’s armour swings its sword at the head of the tallest god, missing as the attack is merely reflected back onto him.

The horse scales the stone arm, galloping toward him, and Guts recognizes its rider - the ghostly cavalier who had warned him of his “unkingly other half” long ago. Was Griffith who he meant?

Griffith glares at the intruder, cleaving the space around the knight in two with a flick of his fingers. Scraps of ruined apostles kicked up in the wake of it, falling into the bloody lake with a series of splashes.

In the frenzy of adrenaline and heartache, none of Guts thoughts come through clearly as he’s scooped up onto the back of the Skull Knight’s saddle and carried into the break of day.

* * *

 

Femto’s hand lifts, palm spread, intent on finishing what he started. Before the incorporeal reach of his fingers can clamp down on the skeleton, Guts is pulled up onto the horse’s back.

It should mean nothing, make no difference at all, but the sight of Guts, bruised and perhaps gravely wounded, stirs something yet deeply buried in him.

“How unexpected,” Slan muses, “then again, we cannot predict everything. We’re not even gods, after all.”

The warm sunlight envelops Guts, fading away from Femto’s sight, until all that remains is the decay of thousands of dead, men and apostles alike, festering in the eternal twilight of the Interstice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> disclaimer: as you can see this is where this fic will really start to deviate from canon. i struggled with this chapter for a long time but eventually decided to kill casca off with the rest of the band of the hawk because 1) i refuse to write rape, and 2) i hate the role miura has given casca post-eclipse and i think its a great disservice to her character, so i don't want to give her the same fate here.


	4. black swordsman, white hawk.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears  
Looms but the Horror of the shade,  
And yet the menace of the years  
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.  
  
It matters not how strait the gate,  
How charged with punishments the scroll,  
I am the master of my fate:  
I am the captain of my soul.

\- "Invictus", William Ernest Henley

 

 

He doesn’t understand. Doesn’t understand what happened, why Griffith did this - if it was even Griffith’s choice at all - but most importantly, he doesn’t understand why he’s still alive.

Skull Knight explained some of it to him, that he was used as a blood sacrifice for Griffith’s ascension to demonhood, that the ceremonial Eclipse he was part of only took place every couple of centuries and that surviving it meant he must have escaped the flow of causality, if only for a short while, but these aren’t the things Guts wants to know. He can accept that everyone has died, he’s seen many of the Band of the Hawk fall in battle before. It’s Griffith that confuses him. 

Before he escaped, Griffith watched apostles (that’s what Skull Knight called them, the servants to the God Hand) tear Guts’ arm off and gouge out his eye, and reacted with apathy. Even Casca’s death didn’t faze Griffith. Did he simply not care about them at all? Did he ever? Or was the monster that rose from Griffith’s old self not the Griffith Guts knew at all?

When he woke up three days after his escape, dazed and reeling from blood loss, he found himself in the old mine under Godo’s house, his wounds being tended to by Rickert. Godo had fashioned him a false arm to replace the one he’d lost, and it lay heavily against the soft mattress. It felt, in his mind, like the moments after a victory in battle - suspended, quiet, peaceful. Then the memories came flooding back and he was curled up trembling with loss. 

He refused to tell Rickert what happened. There was a devastating fight, the Band of the Hawk lost, and Guts was the only one left - that’s all Rickert needed to know. When Rickert asked if Griffith was dead, too, Guts told him he didn’t know, but he thought so, and that in either case, they would probably never see Griffith again.

Sleeping, eating, talking - he could barely do any of it anymore. It was only a matter of hours before being cooped up in the damp, cloying cave wore down his nerves and the pent-up emotions in his chest screamed for some outlet. He took to the outdoors, running through glade and meadow, the brand on his neck burning as he tempered the swords in Godo’s armory with the blood and ectoplasm of spirits ravenous for the flesh of a sacrifice. Sometimes the Skull Knight would materialize before him, commending his efforts to scrabble and struggle through the mud of his life, but most of Guts’ nights passed alone and he would collapse into his rickety bed in the cave come morning to relive the Eclipse in his nightmares.

The memories were the worst. The sound of hammer hitting steel in Godo’s forge above threw his thoughts back to the distant clang of metal against teeth as half-dead men clambered futilely to claw out of the mouths of apostles. Mushrooms floating in the soup Erica brought him morphed into eyes bobbing along the surface of a bloody lake. The twin freckles of sunlight that snuck in from the cracks in the cave walls seemed to watch him like the brutal eyes of Griffith through the veneer of pain as he was maimed. 

There was no rest for him, nor would there ever be. As Skull Knight had explained it, he was now trapped in a space between the astral and physical worlds, doomed to be hunted by demons and a danger to humans because of the brand. 

Rickert looked at him with pity, Erica blanched when confronted with his deformed body and aggressive self-isolating, and Godo watched him with the sagacity of a dying man who recognized another of his ilk. Guts was different now, rough-edged and anxious, wholly apart from everyone else, like Skull Knight had said. It was impossible to go back to the way things were. 

That’s why when an apostle lumbered up the hillside and toward Godo’s home, Guts’ chest filled with relief. He killed it with determination on his face and a mind blank of all fear, focused for the first time since he woke without an arm or an eye and the screams of his friends chorusing in his thoughts. It was familiar, it was something he could do, a purpose he could grab hold of and run with. 

“This,” he’d told Godo, pointing to the brand on the back of his neck that dribbled blood down his spine, “attracts them. I can’t get rid of it or turn it off. As long as I’m here, none of you are safe.”

Godo huffed then nodded, turning back into his shop and rummaging through the dust-laden weapons.

“You’re leaving? But where are you gonna go?” Rickert had asked. 

“Dunno. To wherever those monsters are,” Guts had replied gruffly, although that was only half of his plan. If the apostles served the God Hand, then if Guts killed enough of them, perhaps it would catch the God Hand’s notice. He could slaughter his way to Griffith.

“Can I come?” 

“No.”

“But if these demons killed the Band of the Hawk, I want to get revenge. They were my friends!”

“I said no, okay!” Guts had shouted, and Rickert stepped back. Guts sighed, “If you come, you’re only gonna get hurt or get in my way. Stay here and learn from Godo, so when I see you next you can make me a big sword to cut all their heads off with, alright?”

Godo reemerged with a blade the size of which Guts had never seen. It was almost as tall as him and thick, the folded steel wider than his wrist. “The nastiest thing I’ve ever made. I call it Dragonslayer. You always break the swords I give you - I think this one will be hardy enough.”

Guts strapped the sword onto his back, wrapped bolts for the crossbow on his prosthetic arm in cloth and shoved them in his bag, pulled on his boots, silent the whole while.

The three watched him leave, the black of his cloak coloured with the violet rays of sunset. Erica waved, but Guts didn’t turn back to look, becoming a shadow in the thicket of trees dotting the mountainside. Godo gave a hacking cough, the cold air harsh on his weak lungs, and, setting his mouth in a grim line, said, “He’s not coming back.”

* * *

It’s the second night of walking along dirt paths toward distant cities, and Guts is finding it a challenge to keep his eyes open. He hasn’t the money nor the charm to earn himself a room at an inn, and he’s too shady-looking to squat in an alleyway unnoticed, so he settles for the ruins of a cottage just outside the bounds of a small village, near a dilapidated mill.

The cottage is caved in - the rotten wood ceiling probably collapsed years ago - and the stench of mold permeates the mossy furniture, but there’s a space of brick under the yawning gap above covered by a latticework of tree roots and vines that will keep the rain out.

Dawn is breaking by the time he settles in. Night is the time of haunting, the time when demons creep out of creek and bush and reach for him. He has been forced to become nocturnal, swinging his sword into the early hours to keep the monsters at bay. It’s just another degree of separation between him and the rest of the world.

Guts folds his legs one over the other and leans against the crumbling wall, wincing at the aches in his back. He feels a thousand years older than he did just a few weeks ago, before everything went to shit; back when he still had a place to belong to, and Casca, and Griffith. In fact, he barely even feels like the same person.

Huddled up and with his sword in his lap, Guts thinks he must look like he did the night he left the Band of the Hawk. Again, he’s let himself grow used to company, and again, he notices the weight of the absence of others more heavily than ever. There’s a loneliness that gnaws on his insides and while one part of him desires distance and solitude so he might protect himself from having to lose the people he could get close to like he did in the Eclipse, there’s another nagging, tiny part of him that pines for company.

His eyes melt shut, and the sting of exhaustion subsides as he’s pulled deep into sleep. 

* * *

 

Soft humming rouses Guts, and the fingers skimming lightly over his shoulder blade, warmth-kissed by the setting sun, stop as he lifts his head. Griffith smiles at him, one arm resting under his head and the other rubbing Guts’ back. Wild daisies poke through the gaps where his white hair billows out over meadow grass. “You must have been tired; you slept a long time.”

Guts is resting on Griffith’s chest, their legs entwined and chests pressed together. He lifts his face from Griffith’s collarbone and yawns, “Where are we?”

“We walked up here to watch the clouds, remember? But you ended up falling asleep, so really, I guess it’s more like watching the sunset now, instead,” his thumb strokes Guts’ cheek. Guts has to grapple with the urge to let his eyes flutter shut.

Something doesn’t feel right. 

He looks down the hillside for tents or a fire sizzling, any sign of the Hawks’ dwelling, but there’s only the forest. “Where is everyone?”

Griffith tilts his head, “What do you mean? It’s just you and me.”

“Casca, Pippin, Judeau, Corkus, Gaston… did they leave?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Guts. We don’t know anyone with those names,” his eyebrows furrow and cards his fingers through Guts’ hair, “Are you feeling alright? You’re acting strange.”

“No, nothing’s wrong with me, I just… How do you not know them? Even Casca? You’re telling me you don’t know who Casca is?”

“Of course not.” He says it definitively, no emotions crossing his face. “I’m worried about you. I think you might be getting sick.” 

There’s no way Griffith wouldn’t know the names of his own comrades. But he was right - all signs of the Hawks have been eradicated, and it seems as though the two of them are truly alone here, on this hill overlooking the red sun sinking past the horizon. 

“Maybe you’re not getting enough sleep - you must be too tired to think straight. Here,” Griffith presses Guts’ face to his neck, “you can lie on me. Go back to sleep.” 

“I don’t-”

“It’s okay,” Griffith shushes, rubbing Guts’ back again, “I’ll watch over you. Sleep, Guts.”

* * *

 

“Griffith?”

His voice echoes through the ruins of the empty house. 

“Oh. Just a dream,” he mumbles to himself, pulling his cloak up his shoulders to block out the cold. A lingering sigh whooshes out of him.

Bones creak as he rises to his feet, setting his heavy boots one in front of the other back onto the road. It’s easy to ignore bodily functions when he’s walking or sleeping or anxiously waiting for an apostle to jump out at him, but after a few hours of rest he’s becoming acutely aware of the grumbling in his stomach. He doesn’t have time to stop any longer than he already has, though; every wasted moment is a moment for Griffith to get further away from him. 

Rain pelts down, and the sky is painted in a somber grey guise. He follows the dusty path east, passing travellers and young boys delivering sacks of feed to farmers. By dusk, he’s made it past the city walls, towards the heart of the town. There’s no solid plan he’s following, but common sense would have him believe that the more people there were concentrated in one area, the higher the chances would be of an apostle lurking. Cities would be ripe for the picking when it came to finding demon meals.

Nobody looks him in the eye as he moves through the streets, and whispers follow after him. A woman carrying a market basket jumps out of his way as he passes, mothers clutch their children close. He’s not surprised. Even before he lost an arm and an eye, people watched him warily like he was a criminal. 

The marketplace is slowly emptying. Stragglers still buying groceries and merchants closing up shop bustle in and out, eager to get home before dark. An old man sitting behind a table full of dusty trinkets calls his sale prices to the open air, promising the best jewelry and baubles to be found in this part of Midland. Guts continues on, past the crowds and toward the poorly-lit slums. 

As a mercenary, Guts knows better than anyone else how the rich feel about the poor. When the lords and barons he worked for assigned him jobs, they would always say “it doesn’t matter what you do in the common streets, just keep the fighting away from the manor houses.” If people went missing on skid row, the town officials wouldn’t consider it grave enough to send out search parties or post guards up and down the streets of their hovel district. It’s the perfect hunting ground for creatures of the night.

Children with pock-marked faces and protruding ribs huddle together in the shadowy alleyways, picking through burlap sacks full of garbage that have been thrown curbside. Griffith never spoke of his past much, but Guts remembers being told that Griffith was once like them. He stole his meals from strangers and picked the pockets of aristocrats, running up and down the back alleys of his hometown playing knights with his fellow street rats. Though they both came from dirt, they differed in the sense that while Guts has been fighting his whole life, for Griffith, fighting was just a temporary means to reach his goal.

“What are you doing, walking by yourself so late? You look lonely.”

The voice comes from a nearby street corner, and his head swivels to follow it. A flash of light hair falling in curls over a pale shoulder, an aquiline nose, two blue eyes peering out at him - Guts chokes on the breath caught in his throat, heart pounding at the mistaken familiarity before he realizes that this isn’t who he thought. 

A young girl, probably no older than 17, is there leaning against a wooden shop sign, her skinny wrists turning as she plays with a lock of her hair. The long leg that sticks out of the slit in her ragged dress is mottled with bruises, and around her left eye a ring of dark violet and sickly green marks the indented flesh. 

Guts grunts and turns away, hearing footsteps following behind. 

“Do you hear me? I asked if you need someone to keep you company,” she runs her fingers down his arm. 

“Don’t fucking touch me,” he warns, ripping his arm away. The whole lonely thing is probably just a line she uses to reel idiots in, but Guts feels exposed nonetheless. He doesn’t need strangers psychoanalyzing him. With a scowl, he pushes through and continues on.

Past the slums and through the clean-swept cobblestones of the abbey, wherein the ministers and priests were making their way home from the towering cathedrals in the citadel, Guts stared up at the castle, its windows shining with candlelight.

Immediately, the brand on the back of his neck starts to bleed.

“Huh…?” He squints through the darkness, ears straining to hear. Rain hits the gutters, bounces off the straw thatched roofs of houses, dampening his senses, and he feels deaf to the world around him. The sensation of being trapped overwhelms him fast.

A figure comes to the window a floor up, pacing back and forth. It’s an older, stout man, and he appears to be anxious as he barks out orders to people unseen. The brand burns hotter, brighter. 

He keeps his back against the castle walls, skirting the perimeter as he searches for a way in. From his bulky form to the hulking sword he carries, Guts is not well-suited for stealth, yet there’s an aspect of his own physicality that, by some miracle, allows him to blend into the shadows when need be. Therefore, he manages to scale a dying tract of vine cascading up the castle wall, kick in a latched window, and find himself in a dusty library without being detected.

No candles have been lit in this wing, drapes pulled over the paintings lining the walls and metal locks fixed on every door handle. Whatever this part of the castle was for, it had been purposefully covered, sequestered away out of sight. The sound of rapid steps grew louder as Guts snuck toward the main hall.

“I don’t care who you have to call in or if I have to pull every guard in the city from their post! Find Theresia!” 

“B-but sir, we’ve already closed the city gates and notified our men at the border; she won’t make it far without being stopped. Teenagers run away all the time, it’s quite normal.  So is it really necessary to-"

“Did you hear me?! I don’t care! Get my daughter back home to me or I’ll burn the whole city down to find her myself!”

“Y-yes, Count.” Scuffling and nervous chatter follow the words as heavy footsteps retreat and the slamming of a door echoes off the stone floor. The brand practically sings, betraying the first voice for its true form - an apostle.

Getting rid of the soldiers milling about the foyer is more like a warm up than a substantial fight. Guts has been itching to find an apostle since the one he killed outside Godo’s mines. The lower demons are meaningless to his plan, lacking the power to call upon the God Hand, and the apostles are the ones who tore him and his friends limb from limb during the Eclipse. 

The doors creak open as Guts enters, a vast throne room filling his sight. Pillars rise from the flat marble underfoot, curling against the ceiling like tendrils of smoke. In the center, the same figure he saw in the window stands, hands folded pleasantly across his stomach.

“I thought I smelled blood,” the Count says, smiling sedately. He has too many teeth. “I haven’t seen you since the Eclipse, but I’ve heard rumors. You’ve been making a name for yourself, haven’t you, Black Swordsman?”

Guts fists clench. He had no idea there were rumors about him, nor that he’d earned himself some stupid moniker among the legions of demons. “Summon the God Hand,” he bites out.

The Count laughs. “Why? What makes you think I have the power or the desire to do such a thing?”

“You’re their servant, aren’t you? Get them to come down here. I need to have a word with them. Do it or I’ll kill you.”

“I don’t have time for you, boy. But with my daughter missing and countless search parties returning to me empty handed, I could use a chance to blow off steam. That big sword won’t help you here.”

A long, withdrawing screech pulses through the air as the Count transforms, skin shedding to make way for the deformed optical tentacles and slimy ridges delving into his back. Guts grips his sword tight, swinging as the Count swipes his tail across the room, a pillar crumbling to pieces after he misses a strike aimed toward Guts.

Each failed strike hits closer and closer, knocking Guts off his feet and making him scramble for purchase. He can’t get a single hit in with his sword that does severe damage because getting too close is a death sentence, and what he does manage to slice open or sever regenerates faster than he can keep up with.

He’s darting from pillar to pillar for cover, the crossbow in his prosthetic arm fresh out of bolts, when a long shadow is cast across the room from the doorway.

“F-father…?”

“Theresia! You’re alright,” the Count bellows, consolation framing his demonic, ugly face. “It’s me, it’s okay… it’s father.”

The beautiful child sinks to her knees, bawling at the sight of the monster. Guts sees his chance for survival in the hesitation that sets the Count back and grabs hold of the girl, pressing his sword against her little neck. The tentacles weaving toward him halt in their tracks.

“You - you bastard!” the Count spits, torn between risking the life of his own daughter to land the final blow on Guts, or letting Guts back him into a corner to ensure Theresia’s safety. Guts doesn’t give him the chance to think about it. Gunpowder is firing from Guts’ prosthetic arm and into the Count before Theresia is even thrashing to get out of his grasp.

A pained groan stuffs itself into the corners of the room as the Count rolls onto his back, the bottom half of his body blown clean off. Guts releases Theresia, raises his sword over his head, and hacks the Count’s face in two. 

“Stop! Stop!” Theresia yells, covering her eyes with her fingers. The action sends the leather bag she had slung over her shoulders falling to the ground, spilling its contents. A block of cheese, three slices of bread, a change of shoes, and then, like an unwelcome guest, a mud brown behelit rolls out, across the floor, bouncing off Guts’ shoe. His eyes widen.

“Why do you have this?!” Guts demands, but Theresia is too incoherent to answer. Just as it had in every one of Guts’ nightmares, the eyes of the behelit blink open, and it shatters the air with its scream. Guts succumbs to the numbness of his body and collapses just as the five silhouettes of the God Hand materialize. 

Griffith stares down at him, limp and struggling to stand in a pool of his own blood, but he doesn’t say anything. This is Guts’ first good look at him since before he became… whatever this monster was. The God Hand called him Femto, not Griffith. Were they not the same person? Is the real Griffith dead, and this new impostor just walks around in his old body, holding all his memories, speaking in his voice?

The Count writhes in pain, his halved head squirming wetly on the marble floor. “Pl-please… Archangel Void, grant me my wish! Kill this man and avenge me!”

“No, we can’t do that,” Void answers. His voice eats its way into Guts’ mind, like maggots burrowing in a corpse.

Curdling blood and slime oozes toward Guts as the Count’s frantic squirming becomes frenzied, “What? Why not?!”

Slan titters, raising a hand to cover her mouth, “Because that’s not what your true desire is. You have no personal hatred for him - you’re merely afraid to die.”

“But he’s the Black Swordsman! He’s destroyed apostles of the God Hand… You should consider him an enemy!”

“Black Swordsman?” Griffith repeats, his head tilting to the side as he continues to meet Guts’ eyes. Now, and back then too, during the Eclipse - why is Griffith always watching him?

“Y-yes! That’s what they call him. He killed dozens of us during the ceremonial sacrifice, and since then he’s scourged forests and countrysides, purging demons. Even me!”

Griffith seems interested, listening intently. Guts can feel his eyes rove across his body, lingering on the prosthetic canon arm, the sword clutched in his broken fingers. 

Slan’s wings shift, flapping against the open space boredly. “The deaths of a few worthless servants are meaningless to us.”

“But certainly if he kills enough, then-”

Void motions for silence, “Enough. We were summoned for a reason, Count. To fulfill your wish, you must give us a sacrifice.”

“Oh, uh, of course! For that, use the Black Swordsman,” the Count’s frayed feelers reach for him, like he might be able to shove Guts to them in offering.

“He won’t work, Count!” Slan states shrilly. “The boy has already been claimed for sacrifice. Moreover, he’s only your enemy. The sacrifice must be someone important to you, part of your soul… someone whose loss would be like losing a part of yourself.”

Any thoughts Guts had of trying to finish the Count off from here were forgotten when the weight of those words settled. 

“Your daughter, she will suffice. Anyone else would be meaningless. You must give up the love you have for her so your heart can be filled with evil.”

This was the meaning of a sacrifice, Guts realizes. If he was to become Griffith’s sacrifice, then did that mean Griffith must have loved him then, in some way? When Griffith let him be branded with the mark, did it mean he lost all feelings for him entirely? 

“N-no, not Theresia!” the Count cries, his severed limbs flopping uselessly.

“It’s  _ easy _ , Count. Just do what you did last time.” 

Theresia whimpers, her hands bunching up the thin fabric of her nightgown. “Last time…?”

Slan makes a noise of feigned shock, her voice turning to a low purr, “Oh my, the poor girl doesn’t even know what her father’s done?”

Ubik hums in agreement, “We should tell her, shouldn’t we? It’s only right the little lady knows the truth.”

The Count shakes his head desperately, “Please, I beg you...” 

“Seven years ago, when you were still small, you, your mother, and your father all lived peacefully together here, in this castle. The perfect family… or so it would seem,” Ubik begins, ignoring the Count’s pleas.

“But your father was very busy, and was often away from home for long periods of time. You see, Theresia, the land was full of pagans, and it was your father’s job to drive them out! One day he came back from a long, tiring campaign, excited to see his beautiful wife and daughter. And that’s when it happened.”

Guts’ ragged breathing is calming, though the brand stings and aches. Still, Griffith’s slitted pupils are trained on him, following the intake of breath and the rise and fall of his chest. It reminds Guts of the moments in the middle of a fight when he would catch Griffith’s gaze through the skirmish of swords and splattering blood.

“A horrible stench of sweat and a tangling mass of bodies, and at the center of it all, atop a devilish statue with the body of a man and the head of a goat, was a woman screaming in ecstasy - your mother.”

The Count sobs his daughter’s name, but she’s not listening, only shaking her head, refusing to believe what she’s being told.

“Your father went into a blind rage and slaughtered everyone inside. Then, when only your mother was left, he hesitated to finish her off. He couldn’t kill her because he loved her, and it made him weak.”

Griffith’s eyes move up to Guts’ face, tracing along Guts’ sweat-slick forehead, the dirt smeared across his cheekbone, his lips. Guts can’t tell if Griffith is just simply looking at him or trying to tell him something. Although Guts wants to listen to what Ubik is saying in hopes that it might help him understand what Griffith’s done to him by marking him for sacrifice, he finds it hard to focus when Griffith is staring at him like this. 

“After betraying him, lying to him, abandoning him, she still held all his love in the palm of her hand. He was devastated. He even tried to kill himself, but we intervened. To escape the sadness of his cursed love, he sacrificed her.”

“No, no, no...” the Count trails off, weeping silently.

“You did! The person you loved and hated the most… you gave it to us so that you could bury your fragile human heart.”

Griffith’s lips fall open, like he might say something, his eyes betraying an emotion that seems almost forgotten. There’s a glimmer of the old Griffith there, then it fades and dies, crushed under the heel of the impervious mask that rises up on the new Griffith’s face as he rips his gaze roughly away from Guts and turns to the Count instead. Guts feels like he’s lost something, and pushes himself up onto his forearms toward Griffith, hands trembling under the strain of his own body weight. 

“You must make the decision, Count,” Griffith says, sounding cold and detached. “Sacrifice your daughter and live, or spare her life and die.”

There’s a cool draft of wind and a distant note of groaning despair as a spiral begins to unravel overhead. Hands push out from the opening gyre, groping and tensing, searching for something alive. 

“But I can’t… Theresia…”

“Your life is waning, Count. Time is running out. Look, already the souls of Hell yearn to take you with them.”

Shrieks and yelps of pain resonate through the room, deafening in their volume as the vortex spreads, faces becoming visible in the mangled disarray of corpses.

“That’s… Hell?”

“Yes. All those who become involved with demonkind must go to Hell. It is your fate,” Griffith’s sharp stare flickers back to Guts for a split second. Guts gapes, wide-eyed, at the damned souls reaching toward the Count. He knows that someday, he’ll be dragged to Hell with them, too, thanks to Griffith. Rage spikes hot in his chest. Is the Band of the Hawk among this mass of tortured souls?

“I don’t want to die!” The Count screams.

“Then say those words. Give her to us. The choice is simple,” Conrad replies.

A minute’s hesitation is all it takes - the Count is seized by the hungry dead and ferried to the afterlife wailing his daughter’s name, asking for her forgiveness.

_ A sacrifice… A sacrifice…  _

They veer toward Guts, the brand bleeding down his neck viciously. He slashes at them when they grab hold of his leg, slicing the bloodied skulls into ribbons. 

“A shame. And the Count could have been great, too,” Slan sighs, hardly even noticing Guts still hacking away at the spirits below. The God Hand is beginning to dwindle, their hold on this little pocket of space and time dimming, with the main event finished. 

“No, w-wait… Griffith!” 

Griffith meets his eyes again, seeing Guts sway on his feet, shaky from blood loss. He drags his sword along after him as he approaches the raised dais the God Hand stand on, stumbling up the steps. 

“I’m not,” Guts gulps in air, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood down his chin as the brand burns uncontrollably in protest of being so close, “done yet.”

His hand spasms in the midst of all the pain, sword slipping out of his grip and falling to the floor below with a hollow  _ clang _ . 

It makes no difference. He doesn’t need a sword. Even if he can just talk to Griffith, get an answer -

“Don’t you know the brand hurts when a demon is nearby? For a lesser demon, it might only be a pinprick, but for something like me… the pain might kill you.” 

The words are spoken with none of the malice Guts was expecting. He sounds just like he used to: calm, matter-of-fact. It’s like nothing has changed.

“I d-don’t… care…” Guts growls out, feeling his vision blur as his heart starts racing. Whether it’s from the pain or not, he can’t tell. The God Hand are fading faster and faster from sight.

“This is foolish, Guts.”

Hearing Griffith say his name makes Guts wrench his eyes closed, sadness and anger and regret and loneliness swirling behind his lids. After everything he’s done, how can Griffith address him so casually? Doesn’t he feel _ anything _ ?

When he opens his eyes, Griffith is gone. Like a dream he’s woken up from, Guts can’t seem to slot any of it properly in his mind, the passing images slipping over one another as the sound of Griffith saying his name echoes within.

Theresia’s cries quiet to soft whines as Guts jumps back down the stairs, picking his sword up with a far off look. 

“... Who were those people? Why did they do that to my father? Why couldn’t they let him live?”

“Dunno,” he fastens his ratty cape over his shoulders, slotting his sword back into its holster.

“I want to go back to my room,” she crosses her arms over her chest, rocking back and forth, “my room is safe. I want to go back to my room!” Tears and snot river down her face as she begins to cry again fiercely. 

Guts isn’t listening. His thoughts remain transfixed on the already fleeting memory of Griffith’s eyes, all their focus on him, dumb to the rest of the world as if they were the only two there. Despite the hatred for Griffith that simmers in Guts’ chest, he still warmed under Griffith’s unflinching gaze, reveling in the attention. 

It’s hard to hate Griffith. He knows that Griffith isn’t Griffith anymore, but those infinitesimal moments where a stray emotion or lingering habit slips through the cracks and makes Guts stubbornly hope that Griffith is still there, deep down, dissolves Guts’ will instantly and makes Guts furious with himself.

“No… This all started when  _ you  _ came here. If it weren’t for you, none of this would have ever happened…” she sneers at him, trembling. He doesn’t reply - there’s no need to. Her voice pitches up to a scream, “I hate you! I wish you’d just die!”

He turns, regarding her stonily. She’s tiny, probably no older than nine or ten, and with her long hair and pretty white dress she looks more like a doll than a girl. “Yeah? Well, if you grow up strong and train hard, one day if we meet again, you can get the job done yourself and kill me.” 

If she says anything in retort, he’s not paying attention enough to hear it. He’s already thinking ten steps ahead as he leaves the toppled castle, planning his next move, searching for the next city, the next apostle to hunt down. When he kills them, Griffith comes. If he keeps struggling, grappling with those monsters, he’ll see Griffith again, and maybe next time he’ll be able to say what he wants to say. 

Tears prick at his eyes as he crosses over the city border and the shouts of soldiers, finding their master dead, fade into the darkness.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i reread the past chapters before posting this and i think it's becoming clear what the (rather obvious) theme of this fic is: dreams - both of the sleeping variety and in terms of ambition. even the title is a reference to a poem about the ideals of dreams and the harsh realities of the real world. the association of warmth with love and cold with loneliness is more like a recurring symbol than a theme here, but i've noticed that i use that quite frequently, too. anyways lol lemme know what you think of this chapter and if the way i write dream sequences makes sense because i have no fucking clue what im doing


	5. via dolorosa.

In this short Life that only lasts an hour  
How much - how little - is within our power

\- "(1292)", Emily Dickinson. 

  


The water chills him to the bone, but as long as it gets the mud and gore off, Guts doesn’t care. He scrubs under his fingernails and tugs at the caked dirt in his hair until it washes the river brown, eyeing the heap of clothes he’s left on the bank every so often to watch that they’re not soaked by the rising gush of waves.

Although it’s been months since he left the Count’s city, he can’t seem to stop thinking about it. The behelit he’d swiped off the floor, bathed in the coagulating blood of the apostle, weighed heavy in his bag like a brick, and when he held it in his hand he could see movement behind its eyelids, as if it were slowly waking. Each night he dragged himself into a cave or backed against a tree to sleep, nursing new wounds from the demons that ripped at his skin in hordes after sunset, the behelit seemed to stir more and more roughly. Guts is scared of what that means.

He hoists himself up onto one of the rocks near the river’s edge, letting the water drip off of him and dry in the sunlight.

There was a time like this, he remembers. A time before everything went wrong, and the Eclipse swallowed up the place where he belonged and spat him out, cursed to live a life-in-death, not quite human but not quite monster, either. He remembers sitting with his back against a well, smiling even as the pulsing headache of a hangover wracked him with Griffith laughing at his side, water seeping into his pants where Griffith’s wet thigh touched his. Griffith showed him his behelit, then, told Guts it marked him as a person destined for greatness.

Guts had felt unsettled looking at the red-faced pendant on Griffith’s necklace, but when Griffith smiled reassuringly at him, he forgot all about it. Again, at that broken city hall where they fought Zodd together, again that behelit around Griffith’s neck had rolled out from underneath his clothes and scared off even the apostle. There were so many warning signs, so many clues that pointed toward this being Guts’ fate. Why didn’t he listen?

Something about Griffith clouded Guts’ judgement and made his convictions weaken. Even now, he still didn’t want to believe that the one the God Hand called Femto could be the same Griffith he knew. Griffith would never betray him like that, Guts was sure. Yet… Femto spoke just like Griffith, moved just like Griffith, and when he looked at Guts, his eyes held the same look he used to give him.

Guts didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t, what was the truth and what was a lie. Did he merely construct these ideas of Griffith in his head, or had Griffith truly cared about him before the Eclipse? Did Griffith have any emotions left at all, or as the God Hand had said, did evil surge into his hollowed out heart once he committed the sacrifice?

There’s no way for Guts to know. He needs to see Griffith again, away from the God Hand and the fanfare of dying apostles, and ask him for answers. Guts isn’t sure what to think anymore, and the uncertainty makes him anxious.

The sun is already falling down the sky as Guts sloshes his way out of the water and puts his damp clothes back on. His sword feels heavier when he straps it onto his back, as if the momentary stop to bathe had swerved him so far off his path that now he must work extra hard to get back on track.

Deep in the woods, the hoots of owls can be heard, and a deep, guttural growl resounds across the underbrush.

* * *

“Where is he?!”

“I don’t - ugh - I don’t know!”

Guts carves the knife downward, splitting open the apostle’s lip and brushing the tip of its bifurcated tongue. Its slitted eyes looked up at him with fear.

“How do none of you ever know? You work for the God Hand, you’re saying they don’t at least tell you how to contact them?”

The apostle spits blood at his feet, and its saliva burns like acid through the grass below. It licks its lips, baring its jagged teeth at him still, despite being wounded beyond hope.

“If I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. You’ll kill me anyway, so I might as well die with some dignity. Maybe then they won’t send me to hell like the others who squealed.”

Nothing Guts does seems to help him at all. He’s no closer to Griffith than he was before, and each fight he has with an apostle wears his body down, sending his hands shaking for days afterward. The only thing he’s gotten so far is the lingering sense of satisfaction that comes with slaughtering these things. It was revenge, in a way - every apostle he would ever kill was there for the Eclipse, eating his comrades and tearing the Band of the Hawk limb from limb. Guts wants to make these monsters feel the fear he did when he watched them rip the fabric of his world open. He wants to see tears in their eyes as they die and smell the nervous sweat break across their brows when they see him draw near.

The blade sinks deep into the apostle’s eye, and Guts feels a _pop_ as something inside is ruptured. Clear, slick fluid leaks out of the socket, caking the lower lashes as a scream rips from the warbling apostle. She tries to clutch at her eye, but Guts has already severed both her arms.

“A dream!” she cries, “I had a dream of him…”

Guts inhales sharply, “What dream?”

“We’ve all dreamed of him… the hawk.”

“Spit it out,” he growls, driving his knife in further. Her ruined pupil still thrashes wildly, desperately wanting to rebuild itself around the foreign metal.

She sobs, glaring up at him as she seethes between her teeth, “Soon, the one you belong to will be reborn. In a tower to the east he’ll rise out of the corpses and carrion and be washed anew in their blood as his baptism.” Her whole body shudders, “Now kill me, Black Swordsman. I won’t tell you anything more. Not that it matters, anyway - I’m sure if you disrupt his resurrection, he will end you just as you’ll end me. Humans are nothing to gods.”

“Resurrection? Tower? What the hell are you talking about?”

With the last of her breaths, she laughs at him. Then she yanks her head away from his blade and dashes her forehead in against the rocks beneath her before he can say anything else.

“Fuck! None of you ever tell me anything!” he yells as he stabs her still chest again and again, watching blood bloom from the myriad wounds, oozing black sludge. When he’s exhausted himself he slumps over, letting the knife fall from his limp hands.

He feels so stupid. All of the apostles he’s killed, the sleepless nights he’s scourged the forests and glades going after every demon and monster he could, and he’s still no closer to finding Griffith than when he first started.

Hasn’t it always been like this? Griffith used to devise everything to completeness, carefully placing his pawns across the playing field in anticipation for his final, devastating move. Yes, it’s always been like this, except… before, Guts was a part of it. Griffith said himself that all his plans were made with Guts in mind. Maybe Guts is just, for the first time, experiencing how it feels to be stuck on the outside.

At least he has a direction, now. For all he knows, the apostle could have been lying about this tower in the east, but he has nowhere else to go. He scrubs his face with his palm and leans his weight against the apostle’s gigantuan corpse as he pulls himself up.

She had said that if he interrupted whatever Griffith was doing at the tower that Griffith would kill him. Guts wonders if there was any truth to that - would Griffith really? At the Eclipse he spared Guts, and at the Count’s castle, too, but perhaps Guts wasn’t even enough of a threat for Griffith to bother with him then.

The thought that he could be so irrelevant now to Griffith made Guts’ fists clench.

There was a fluttery panic in his chest that told him he needed to go faster, get to Griffith sooner, before he was too far gone. He had seen an inkling of the old Griffith at the Count’s castle, hadn’t he? Maybe if he got to Griffith before the God Hand corrupted him further, Griffith could be saved. Maybe.

* * *

Each day the roads swell with carts and carriages full of people from the cities. They push past Guts and let their horses rear him to the roadside, eager to get away from what Guts is heading toward.

“That’s mighty dumb of you, mister! There’s nothing that way but lepers and plague rats. You’d do best to stick to the detours like the rest of us,” a woman calls out to him from a hole in the canvas of her wagon.

“Faster this way,” he grunts in reply.

“Hah! Faster to your death, maybe. None of my business what idiots want to do, I guess,” she shakes her head disapprovingly as she guides her horses to a trot, kicking up dust at Guts’ back.

From the bits and pieces of conversations he hears, Guts figures some sickness must be damning the countryside. Everyone is heading east, like him, to get away, packing what they can and scorching the ground behind them. It’s like they’re all sheep being corralled into a small pocket of land, gathered for a purpose. Guts wonders - does it have anything to do with the tower and the ceremony the apostle told him about?

A smoking husk of a village comes into view over the next hill, the grass surrounding burnt black and still smoldering. Guts approaches as he sees dozens of bodies bordering the mud-hut church, a trench dug for their measly mass grave and shoved to the brim with charred hay, burlap, and parchment - kindling for the fire. The tiny hand of a child, untouched by the flame, sticks out from the rubble, as though it were waving at him.

Guts coughs the smoke out of his lungs and turns away.

To think Griffith might have done this, infected cities and farm towns with this disease, kill off children - it just doesn’t make sense.

He keeps his sword drawn the rest of the day’s trek, watching for the dead bodies fading in the distance to rise and chase him down. Places like these, where dark emotions swirled and the stench of death pervaded the air, held spirits like a cage.

By the time night’s fallen, Guts’ vision has gone bleary. How long has it been since he last slept? Three, four days? There wasn’t any point trying to rest out in the open like this - without the light of civilization to keep demons at bay, Guts was a sitting duck just waiting to be pounced on. He refused to succumb to a random forest spirit when he was so close to getting a lead on Griffith.

The shadows darken between the tree trunks, old wood creaking under the cold gusts of wind. Guts shivers. Purple light breaks through the black and a horse whinnies as it clops toward him over the dislodged rocks and brambles.

“You again?” Guts asks as the Skull Knight pulls the reins, pulling his horse to halt.

“We are merely crossing paths, Black Swordsman. We seem to have set the Tower of Conviction as our joint destination.”

“You know about that, too?” Guts’ eyes widen, “An apostle told me Griffith would be reborn there. What does that mean?”

“Yes. A tower in the near city of Albion will set the stage for the Incarnation Ceremony, where the God Hand’s newest will regain his corporeal form through the sacrifice of the restless dead who dwell there. It is a site where the sick and downtrodden have travelled to seek asylum - even this plague is part of a larger plan. The time for the ceremony is swiftly approaching.”

“Griffith wants his body back? But why? And why another sacrifice?”

“Only he knows the true answer to that. However, it is likely he wishes for his human form to conduct his will in the physical world and manifest the dream that drove his hand in the Eclipse,” the Skull Knight’s gaze settles over Guts’ shoulder. “An apostle has made the preparations for Femto’s coming. In the tower he’s trapped the souls of the refugees he’s tortured to serve as the flesh and blood for Griffith’s new form.”

Guts’ heart is pounding. Griffith is coming back? 

“You have a behelit with you,” the Skull Knight suddenly interjects.

“Oh. Uh, yeah, I got it when I killed the Slug Count.”

“Take heed. The behelit groans for the time it will awaken under your guidance. It can sense the despair in your heart, and as you continue deeper down the path you’ve set, it, too, will aim to pull you under. You must not fall into that darkness.”

Guts reaches for it in his bag, turning it over in his hands. The eyelids flutter. “And if it wakes up…?”

“When you confront those who have lost their humanity, you risk losing your own in turn. If your despair stirs the behelit from its slumber, its screams will summon the God Hand, and you will be asked to make a sacrifice.”

He would become like Griffith, or the Slug Count, then. “But I don’t even have anyone to sacrifice. Everyone I know is dead, so what’s the point of the behelit lumping itself in with me?”

“You do have one person.”

Guts goes silent.

“It is unprecedented for a member of the God Hand to be offered for sacrifice. Whether it is even possible, I cannot say for certain. But if the behelit feeds off your sorrow, then it must consider your old friend viable.”

Only the crickets make a sound as Guts stands there, unsure of what to say. He remembers what the God Hand said to the Slug Count: a sacrifice can only be the person you love and hate the most.  

“Do you set your sights toward the tower to go after him?” the Skull Knight presses.

“I thought that, maybe, if I saw him again, then I would know what he is. If he’s the same… the same Griffith I knew.”

“The flow of causality is impenetrable. The ceremony has been fated to happen, and thus, it cannot be stopped. Even in his old body, the man you used to call a friend will still have given up his heart to evil. He will never be the way he once was.”

In a way, Guts already knows this. But it doesn’t stop that tiny, unquenchable part of him that hopes Griffith might see him and remember the way things were.

“Until next time, Black Swordsman. We shall meet again when the ceremony commences, at the Tower of Conviction.”

The Skull Knight turns his back to Guts and leads his horse away. All around Guts the forest of Albion is dark and silent.

* * *

Swaying in the ambling twilight, the flayed corpse of a priest hangs from a tree branch.

“This ain’t good. They’ll be out on the prowl for heretics tonight, I reckon,” a stooped man carrying a bucket of water murmurs to his wife, avoiding eye contact with the corpse.

“Amis told me they took over a dozen people since yesterday… all of ‘em minding their business, doing nothing wrong - merely looked at the Chief Inquisitor funny and got locked up because of it,” his wife says back, her tones hushed. “It’s something not right about this place. They got us all cooped up here to pick us off like cows, just ‘cause we got nowhere else to go. I’m thinking it might be better back in the leper colony towns.”

“Watch your mouth! You never know who could be listening in - you don’t want ‘em to tell the Chief Inquisitor you’ve been committing heresy, do you?”

“‘Course not! But you’d think for a city that’s supposed to be under the eyes of God, it might be a little more safe for us common folks.”

“Honestly, Maggie, if you don’t keep quiet with this nonsense, you’re gonna-”

A long shadow looms over the pair. Sharp intakes of breath sound in unison, and the woman’s face is bright red. She turns, water sloshing out of the pail she carries, and gulps audibly as she sees the hulking man behind her. “S-sorry, mister, we was just-”

Guts cuts her off, impatient, “Is this the Tower of Conviction?”

“Huh?”

“I need to find a tower in Albion. The Tower of Conviction. This it?” he points to the edifice reflecting the dying sunlight onto the camp down below.

She cocks her head and places a hand on her hip, the tension gone from her body now that she’s realized Guts isn’t a soldier. “Yeah, it is. But if you’re looking for shelter, you might as well turn around now. This place is a hellhole.”

“Maggie!” her husband jabs her side, willing her to shut up.

“Well, what? It’s true! Nothing to see here but dust and starving people.”

Guts, having received all the information he needs, starts to push past the two, but he halts. Out of his single eye he looks at them, reaching for the sword on his back, “You should get out of here. Something’s gonna happen here tonight, and everyone here will die.”

“Wait! What are you talking about? Hello!” the woman calls after him. Guts doesn’t listen. He has to get to the tower before nightfall - he has to get to the place where Griffith will be.

* * *

Blood bubbles up on the stone steps of the prison, melting the skin of the screaming convicts who claw their fingers ragged against the unrelenting iron doors.

“Help us! Please, help!” voices blend together, mute to Guts as he races up the stairs. The whole tower is shaking under the force of hundreds of demons slowly awakening, corpses rising from their graves and beating their fists upon the ancient walls from outside.

Guts can see the moon high in the sky out of the blasted hole in the main hall, a manmade atrium. The ground below is wracked with groaning refugees, the dark tendrils of spirits boring holes into their eyes, claiming their possession.

His sword is already laden with the blood of soldiers guarding the tower, and his vision seems to be wavering. Having to adjust his perspective in battle to accommodate his missing eye is a hassle enough - accounting for the fuzzy, blurred lens he sees the world through due to exhaustion is even more annoying.

With every step, he feels he’s getting closer to something. On a deep, almost instinctual level, he knows that at the top of this tower, there’s something waiting for him.

The Eclipse seems to have been an eternity past. Guts has only felt pain, and anger, and frustration, and hopelessness since then. If he could do this, if he could finally find Griffith and ask him for the truth, everything would change - that’s what he believes. Griffith is the only person left who really knows him.

Guts rams his sword through the flimsy wood of the barred door and climbs up onto the roof. There’s a moment of still silence cloaking the old tower while humans and demons alike rage on outside the walls and the moon peeks out from behind its veil of clouds, then vanishes.

“You, stop,” a man steps out from the shadows, taller than even Guts, with a face so flat it looks as though it had been slammed against concrete thousandfold. “This is hallowed ground. You have no right to be here.”

“I’m here for the ceremony or resurrection or whatever you wanna call it. Now move.”

The man holds fast. Guts steps forward, and the brand on his neck stings.

“Ah, yes - the renascence of the Angel, the Savior. He has come to me in my dreams, told me, ‘Mozgus, you shall do my bidding,’ and I have faithfully received His orders and gathered a flock here in offering for Him. At first I was hesitant, I doubted Him, I thought that surely all these people shouldn’t be put to death for His ends. But then I saw the corruption, the rot that harrows this place, where men sit together and whisper plots of blasphemy in each others ears, and I knew He was right. I was wrong to let my faith falter, but now I know the truth, and I shall not waver from His wishes. The ceremony will go undisturbed.”

Is Griffith actually coming to the apostles in dreams? Why? Again, Guts feels that sense of being on the outside. He’s only dreamt of Griffith once since the Eclipse, but surely that dream wasn’t actually Griffith’s doing. In that dream, Griffith didn’t give him orders or directions or ask Guts to serve him like he did with the apostles, so surely that couldn’t have been the real Griffith. It had been only a figment of his imagination. Surely.

“You talk a lot, but say nothin’. All you apostles are the same, always going on about these dreams you get from him, but do any of you actually know him at all? Or do you just do what he tells you to do? You’re all idiots… now let me pass.”

“You could not understand, you fool that does not know the Lord. I am the steward of an angel - He does not account for you. The actions of the divine lie beyond human interference. I shall not admit you.”

Guts readies his blade, fingers flexing around the wrapped hilt, “If you won’t let me pass, then I’ll cut my way through you!”

The Dragonslayer arcs high in the air, slicing the skin under the apostle’s rib.

“Ugh,” Mozgus winces, the flesh under his skin undulating, quivering. “If that is how you wish your death to come, then so be it!”

All at once, that undulating flesh cracks, veins popping from beneath Mozgus’ muscles. Rock wings rip through his shoulder blades as he howls into the night.

The impact of Mozgus’ wings hitting the ground sends Guts flying through the air.

“If you know what is good for you, Black Swordsman, you should pray! Pray that the Lord absolves you of your sins and lets you die a swift death!”

Guts stumbles back onto his feet, coughing blood into his palm, “There’s no such thing as God in a world like this. There’s only humans, and animals, and big, ugly things like you. If God was real, something like you wouldn’t exist.”

“I am God’s own will! I am his loyal disciple and follower! Do you not fear God?! Do you mean to oppose my holy duties to the bitter end?” Mozgus slams Guts back with another strike by his wing, laughing. “Even if you mean to, you cannot. Your strength does not outmatch providence.”

“Doesn’t have to… just has to outmatch you,” he pants. Guts is bleeding from his temples, his shins, his hands. This apostle is stronger than the rest he’s fought. It’s like fighting Zodd, he’s in way over his head - but this time, there’s no Griffith to swoop in and save him.

Guts manages to get a blow in on Mozgus’ leg, yet Mozgus barely even falters. In a flurry of steel on stone, Guts charges at the apostle, messily dodging his strikes while trying to land his own.

“Ugh!” Mozgus trips backward, reaching for his side, the place under his rib where Guts had cut him first, and now again. His weak spot?

Guts spins, teeth chattering from the force of it as he swings his sword into Mozgus’ side, hearing him cry out in pain. He’s slammed into the arch of the doorway, but recovery is swift now that he knows what he has to do. For Guts, the fight is already half-over. After the moment he can figure out where to hit so that it’ll hurt the hardest, all he has to do from then on is keep swinging.

At this distance, he can see a faint red glow from Mozgus’ eyes. Guts unhinges the jaw of his prosthetic arm, aims at these little red targets, and pulls the string, hurling the canon at Mozgus’ face. Another swing of his sword, then a jab of the hilt into the open wound, and Mozgus is falling again, his knees bent as though in prayer.

“Ohh…” he groans, pushing himself up, “Lord God, I come now into your presence. But at least, I shall bring this man, your enemy, with me…”

“I’ll pass,” Guts bites out, slashing at Mozgus’ side, then bounding away. “It might be your time to meet the God you love so much, but it sure as hell ain’t mine!”

He forces his sword through Mozgus’ throat, gritting his teeth as he struggles under the weight and hoists the skewered apostle over his shoulder, “If you wanna get to heaven so bad, I’ll do you the favour!”

Guts throws the body over the side of the tower, watching it fall fathoms down into the chaos below.

The blurring of his vision is becoming nearly unmanageable. Rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands only stuns him, leaving black spots fading and brightening in tandem as he blinks. Everything aches, he can hardly tell what hurts and what doesn’t when there’s only this constant dipping pain deep in his bones and coursing through his veins. He knows he can only be moments away from passing out, but he can’t, he won’t let himself, he has to keep going, because soon Griffith will be...

Underfoot the tower starts to give way. Guts clings to the rebar outcropping this furthest battlement as stones crumble and shake beneath him, sloughing off like old snake skin from the structure and leaving behind the faint impression of a hand against the milk-pale moon. The hand of a god reaching up to the heavens.

A horse brays, and Guts turns to see the Skull Knight galloping up the wall of the tower, his arm outstretched and finger pointing toward a light glowing from the palm of the stone hand.

“Is that-?” Guts calls out to the Skull Knight, but he already knows the answer.

It’s as if he no longer has any control over his body. Guts sprints down the parapet, slipping on the avalanche of stones that slide off the tower at a slant, the wounds on his legs and chest brightening as he exerts them to a place beyond recognition.

A figure is curled on the ground in the midst of that blinding white light. It stings Guts’ eye as he nears, tear ducts brimming as he stubbornly refuses to close them. The last time he saw Griffith, when he closed his eyes it all went away. He wouldn’t miss his chance again.

The air crackles with electricity and the smell of sharp ether and sunlight unfurls in the cool mist rolling away from the spot where Griffith lies. He looks like a child, knees tucked into his stomach and chest slowly rising and falling.

He looks just like he used to.

“Griffith…?” Guts bends down, crouching over him. Griffith’s eyes blink open, his hand dragging over the sharp rocks as he slowly wakes, drawing his arms in close to block out the cold.

Femto wouldn’t get cold, and he wouldn’t sleep, or curl in on himself. Femto didn’t seem to feel anything at all, but this is Griffith. It’s Griffith, Guts tells himself.

“Guts?” Griffith’s eyes widen as they land on Guts. He draws one breath, then two, and still Griffith doesn’t stop staring at him, seeming more surprised to see Guts than Guts is to see him, if such a thing were possible.

The cloak on Guts’ back is splattered with blood and half-damp from the rain, yet Guts rushes to get it off and settle it over Griffith. Two little hands creep up from underneath the dark fabric, clinging onto the edges. One leg slots forward as Griffith tries to stand, fumbling like a foal who hasn’t learned to walk, and his white hair sweeps over his shoulders and across his bare chest as he sways unsteadily. Guts reaches out and holds Griffith’s elbow, helping him to stand.

For a second, Griffith leans against Guts’ shoulder, then, as if remembering that he wasn’t supposed to do that anymore, he quickly pulls away.

A long howl bays in the distance, and wings beat against the rising dawn. Zodd, one horn ripped off his crown, shudders the earth as his clawed feet grip the crumbling ledge of the tower.

Griffith turns to Guts like he might say something. The whole tower collapses under the weight of Zodd, and the stone Guts was standing on is wrenched out from beneath him as it gives way. Like the corpse of Mozgus he falls, Griffith’s hand outstretched after him.

* * *

The sun is a red spot high in the sky when Guts wakes. He has to shove the rocks and debris off him to see the full reach of its light, dazzling when only hours earlier the land as far as the eye could see was drenched in hellish darkness.

“Griffith?!”

Guts drags his feet across what’s left of the tower, lifting the remains of wooden doors and broken statues to look for any sign of him - a string of white hair, the glint of his eyes, that red necklace he used to wear, but there’s nothing. Griffith is gone.

Even the Dragonslayer is wrecked. The top corner of it chipped on the fall down, and the wrappings round the hilt were frayed and loosened.

Just like last time, Guts has failed. Why does he always get so close, only to have Griffith snatched away?

The last of the refugees file out of the ruins holding onto each other, what they have left. Guts stands up alone and settles his broken sword into its holster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first of all i wanna give a big ol apology to my girls jill and rosine for not giving you the screen time u deserve here but i promise i will make it up to u someday. second of all as u can see im taking a LOT of liberty when it comes to keeping this canon-aligning, and the course of this story will continue to scoot further and further away from total canon compliancy as it goes on. anyway hope u like it and plz tell me what u think!


	6. bitter reunion.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.  
The curs of the day come and torment him  
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head...  
  
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;  
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;  
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

\- "Hurt Hawks", Robinson Jeffers

 

“So he’s still alive then, is he? Stubborn boy,” Zodd chuckles as he glances down at Guts’ splayed, unconscious body, half-buried in the rubble below. There is a weak twist in Griffith’s  chest at the sight, but it easily subsides as Zodd pushes up off the wall, wings carrying them beyond the ruined tower.

This new body is different from the one that died during the Eclipse - all of the faults of that form had been smoothed over, shaped into something better. The last he remembers of being human was only pain and desperation. His muscles no longer ache like they did then, he cannot feel the glow of the moonlight burning his retinas like they did after a year plunged into darkness in the king’s prison, and his movements are easy, devoid of the pathetic writhing that was all he had been capable of with his cut tendons.

To him, his body has always been a tool. He used it in exchange for money from Gennon, to woo Charlotte, to win Guts in battle. Physicality was a way of getting what he needed and desired; there was never any pleasure from it. If anything, it was a burden to him, and he wanted to be separate from the things he used his body for because none of them were good. They were just a means to an end.

Before he was reborn in this body, he existed only on the astral plane, shapeless save for when he was summoned as Femto. When he was human, he was inseparable from his body, but now that he is no longer tethered to that facet of mortality, he truly can use this form as a tool. He is the master that controls the puppet, not confined to it. He’s untouchable like he never was before.

In all regards, he is a new person, and a better one. He has never felt so free.

* * *

Guts slumps his back against a tree, resting his sword on his lap. A deep crack runs from the point to the central ridge, and the bevelled blade is blunt on one side. Even Godo’s best weapon can’t stand the test of apostles, it seems.

The brief moment of success he’d felt when he found Griffith has been quickly washed over by the crushing failure of knowing that despite his best efforts, he still couldn’t keep Griffith for more than a minute before he’d been whisked away again. Guts is always too little too late, especially when it matters most.

But then, had Zodd not come and Griffith not left, what would Guts have done? For all the thoughts he’s had of killing Griffith, when he saw Griffith waking up in the palm of that stone hand, he knew he couldn’t do it. Griffith still looked exactly like he did back then, before the Eclipse, and the acknowledgement that he was the only person left who really knew Guts opened the cage Guts has shoved his building loneliness into and let that growing beast gnaw at his insides and make him weak.

If Zodd hadn’t intervened, Griffith might be here with Guts. Maybe they’d be talking, and Griffith would finally tell Guts what happened during the Eclipse, and why everyone but the two of them had to die. Maybe Griffith would say whether or not he truly did want the Eclipse all along. Guts isn’t sure he even wants to know the answer to that, still.

His eyes droop along with the setting sun, but a clutch of pain in his side keeps him awake. It took him nearly half a day to notice the injury he’d sustained after falling from the tower - a puncture wound under his lowermost left rib where a piece of rebar had pierced through his skin. Should Guts feel concerned that he was so caught up in pushing himself to keep going, get his sword fixed then go right back to searching for Griffith, that even his own pain was forgotten? He isn’t sure. With each passing day, he seems to lose parts of himself. It’s almost like he’s no longer fully human.

Reaching into his bag for something to stop himself from dozing off and help numb the throbbing under his rib, he feels the smooth stone of the behelit brush against his fingers. The turquoise rock shudders under his touch, and a single eye opens to look at him, the white around the pupil shining through the encroaching darkness. Guts stares back, silent.

_A sacrifice… look, a sacrifice…_

The voices are bottomless, coming up from the earth itself. Guts settles his shaky feet under himself and holds his sword tight, tucking the behelit in his bag and moving away from the tree. He doesn’t know if he could fight, in his current condition.

_Your anger… your sadness… your pain… even your fear… all of it belongs to us._

“Shut up!”

_Do you still want to find him? Do you really think you could mean anything to him now? Give up. Give in to us._

Guts shakes his head as if these things might even know what that means. “Get the hell away! Leave me alone!”

_He doesn’t want you anymore. He doesn’t care about you, that’s why he gave you to us. You’re ours, now._

“You don’t even know anything about that! I don’t belong to you or anybody else!” Guts puts one foot in front of the other, trying to run, but there’s an invisible weight clamping onto his legs and dragging him down, down.

_Give up. Nothing you’re doing means anything. No matter how hard you fight and struggle, you’ll be ours when you die anyway. Why don’t you just get it over with?_

Guts pants under the strain, heaving himself forward, “I don’t care what you to do me after I die, but I’m not letting you take me yet!”

He slashes through the bundle of ink and shadows swirling around his feet, the blunt edge of his sword parting the dark clouds in two. There’s a cacophony of screams and low groans, echoing through the quiet forest, then it suddenly stops and Guts is alone again.

They don’t know about Griffith. They have no idea. Guts has known Griffith longer than any demon or spirit has, and he knows what Griffith was really like, what he still might be, underneath the mask and armour of Femto. Griffith’s arm had reached out to him when he fell from the Tower of Conviction. He’s still in there, someplace, somewhere. Isn’t he?

* * *

One of the better side effects of the plague Conrad has pumped into Midland is the excess of abandoned houses in the cities that have since been wiped clean of people. Snow whirls around outside the window where Griffith stands, in this little citadel, ensconced on a puckered patch of land bordered by a frozen lake. His hand on the glass panes push aside the invading frost, and his breath comes out in puffs.

The decision to stop for the night to rest was made more out of habit than anything else. Being in this human body is causing him to fall back to his old ways - for a moment when Zodd was flying him over the rolling forest past Albion, Griffith felt like he was on horseback again, the Band of the Hawk behind him, but then when he looked to his side for his men, he found no one, and felt dissonance when he remembered that he’s alone now.

Zodd’s snoring rumbles on the floor below as Griffith stacks his armour at the end of the musty bed. As a near-god, the power to make something out of nothing is almost a given, and the armour had come together nearly as soon as Griffith had begun to think about its existence. The lines between cerebral and corporeal are blurred when it comes to Griffith. He can create and destroy as he pleases.

He pokes at the dwindling fire with a stray piece of kindling, watching the flames glow with renewed purpose. The image evokes another stray memory, of reading tales of make-believe creatures from far away lands. There’s a bird of flame, the Phoenix, who collapses in on himself and dies pitifully, only to later be reborn from his own ashes more glorious and strong than ever. Perhaps Griffith is the same. He, too, has died and been reborn from his old self, and his old weaknesses mean nothing to him anymore.

How simple it will be now to forget, he thinks. Guts will no longer be a constant buzzing in the back of his mind, weighing in on his every decision and completing the unspoken second halves of all his thoughts. There will be no more guilt, or regret, or uncertainty - all of those have been replaced with only a sense of clear purpose, the will to follow his dream. Finally, the foolish, basal desires that had scored themselves deep into his now-dead heart have been slaughtered. For the first time in years, Griffith will feel free - that is if he can even feel anything at all.

He’s not sure if he can feel, really. There are the traces of old emotions that ghost along with his expressions and movements, mere remnants of his past self, and he remembers what he should feel, yet his heart is unmoved. Even his dream, the thing he should strive for, seems dull and lacklustre, just residual ambition and precedence. The wishes of the old him almost no longer feel like his own, but when he tries to determine what it is the current him wants, a wall strikes up to block out the answer. He should want for nothing, he knows that, yet there’s a brief ache, a longing for something that’s not there. But what?

Within the fireplace the embers spark and glare under Griffith’s ministrations, red-winged heat licking up the sides of the old brick. The sight of Guts lying there under the toppled bricks of that tower, eyes closed and arms twisted under him, flares in his mind.

The shifting cold here has goosebumps rippling up Griffith’s arms, and he pulls the cloak around his shoulders closer, trembling. Rough fabric that itches at his elbows, stark nakedness and being woken by Guts’ voice in an unending darkness, reaching for Guts’ hand as he falls… all of these have happened before, haven’t they? Guts has wrapped this same cloak over him before, has invaded towers to get to him, but it’s not the same. Griffith didn’t feel scared and relieved when he woke up to Guts watching over him because he can’t feel anything like that anymore. He shouldn’t.

Griffith can still feel it, how tiny he was back then. Guts had held him in his arms and helped wrap the bandages around his jutting rib cage, fingers skirting over the flayed flesh, the ugly hollow in Griffith’s stomach. How little and helpless and humiliated Griffith had been, too weak to even end his own life, too light to drop himself on that jagged piece of wood and let it strike clean through his throat.

Nothing could ever feel worse than watching Guts run to him and put his hand on his shoulder after failing to do the most simple of things and kill himself. At that moment, all of his fears mounted, and he realized that he could never truly escape Guts. During that year of torture, Guts was there, if only in Griffith’s own mind, holding him and smoothing back his hair as Griffith vomited into piles of his own blood. Then, when the light shone on him again and the door to his cell opened, Guts was there, too, his tears on Griffith’s cheek halting the rage Griffith had thought would bubble under his skin forever. Even now, at the Tower of Conviction, Guts had been the first thing Griffith saw when he awoke into this new body.

Ripping his own heart out hasn’t nipped the weakness Griffith used to buckle to. No matter what he does, Guts just won’t go away, won’t leave him alone. Griffith thinks that if Guts were to die it still wouldn’t change a thing; despite the numbness that has flooded him since he gave his sacrifice at the Eclipse, he still finds himself thinking of Guts.

Why does Guts always come after him? Why was he there at the Tower of Conviction? Why didn’t he attack Griffith or scream at him? Why, after everything Griffith has done to sever the ties between them, did Guts still try to help him?

His throat tightens and his hand ghosts over his bicep, feeling the smooth, untouched skin of this new body where his old one held three scars the shape of his fingernails. He used to rip at the skin there until blood trickled down into the crook of his elbow, but now, like it had never even happened at all, there was nothing.

Nothing. This all should mean nothing to him, he reminds himself. The things he used to do and say and feel are no longer a part of him - they died with the rest of the Hawks at the Eclipse. He’s not like that anymore. He’ll never be weak again like he once was. He’ll prove it to himself. He’ll go to Guts and show both Guts and himself just how changed he is, how unaffected and numb he’s become.

Griffith draws his knees into his chest and watches the fire burn out as a new fire begins to break over the distant mountains.

* * *

Godo’s house looks the same as when Guts last saw it. Smoke billows out from the wooden hut above the mines where Godo’s forge sits, but the familiar sound of metal hitting hot metal can’t be heard.

“Guts?”

Erica is standing with a pail of water in one hand and the other over her eyes, shielding them from the sun as she stares out at him. A smile spreads across her cheeks as she lights up with recognition and runs toward Guts, wrapping her arms around his legs.

“It’s been so long! Me and Rickert were worried you weren’t gonna come back.”

“Well, here now, for better or worse. Where’s the old man at? He’ll be pissed at me for it, but I gotta sword for him to fix.”

Her smile drops, and her eyes trail out past the house, tears pricking on her dark lashes. A headstone protrudes from the ground just beside the forge.

“Oh…” Guts murmurs, realization dawning. In all this time he’s been gone, Godo’s been picked off too. Guts didn’t even visit to say goodbye.

“I-it’s been a couple months since. Rickert’s been in the forge every day, making swords and practicing. He said it was for a memorial he’s putting up on the hill. You know, for your friends who all died.”

Guts says nothing. The wound in his side pinches with pain, and he holds it with shaky fingers.

“He’s there now, actually. I think somebody’s come to visit him. Somebody Rickert knows from way back - he said he was Rickert’s friend when they were soldiers.”

Guts’ eyebrows furrow; nobody they used to know was alive.

“Do you know him, too? He had long white hair. He was so pretty… I could hardly tell he was a man. More like someone out of a fairy tale.”

He’s moving before she even finishes her sentence, running up the hill and through the maze of swords dotting the snow. Rickert is there, his back turned to Guts, his hands gesturing wildly as he talks to Griffith.

Griffith looks up, and his eyes lock with Guts’ over Rickert’s shoulder.

“What the hell are you-?” Guts yells, cut off as he nears enough to see Griffith completely. The cloak he gave Griffith is gone, replaced with gleaming silver armour that reflects the light off the snow, carved feathers curling up to his cheeks from over his heart.

Griffith smiles. “Hello, Guts.”

* * *

“Rickert… go inside,” Guts murmurs, putting himself between the boy and Griffith.

“Why? What’s going on? Why won’t anyone tell me anything?”

“Just shut up and go inside. Take Erica with you.”

Rickert does as he’s told, disappearing back into the hut with Erica, watching Guts warily.

Icy air puffs out around Guts as his chest heaves, sucking in breath after breath. Griffith’s eyes are fixated on the movement, gaze slowly dragging up to look over Guts’ face. Violet arcs stamp the skin under Guts’ eyes, marked deep with exhaustion, and his cheeks are gaunt shadows running from under his ears to his cracked, dry lips. He’s so very rundown, like a broken machine on the verge of dying kept together only by pins and pitch. A shudder runs through Guts’ entire body, and he grasps at his side. Griffith can see blood dribble down Guts’ shirt where it’s been slashed through by some sharp object.

“You look unwell,” he comments, voice neutral. “You’re hurt.”

Guts answers through his teeth, “Only because of you.”

Griffith doesn’t know what to say to that. A long moment of silence passes between the two before Guts’ shoulders slump with a sigh, perhaps too tired to keep up that rage swelling in his belly. “Why the hell are you here?”

“I came to see you. We didn’t have a chance to talk at the tower, and I knew you’d be coming here.”

Guts’ guard goes right back up, “How’d you know somethin’ like that?”

The corners of Griffith’s lips pull up, brief amusement flashing into his mind. After all this time, Guts hasn’t changed at all - he’s still a bit slow, a bit forgetful. He nods toward the heavy slice of metal in Guts’ hand, “Partially because your sword is broken, but mostly because I’m omniscient.”

It takes a second for Guts to process what Griffith says, and his stunned look turns into a glare as he realizes Griffith is trying to joke with him. When Griffith is like this, looking and sounding and saying things just like he used to, it’s hard to remember that everything’s changed now.

More silence passes between the two. Guts shivers, and Griffith remembers he’s taken Guts’ cloak. It’s probably the only clothes Guts has besides what he’s wearing. Griffith has rehearsed this meeting in his head over and over, yet now that he’s here, he finds himself strangely unable to speak.

“What’d you want?” Guts seems uneasy, and rightfully so, Griffith supposes. Griffith doesn’t know what he expected Guts to do - try to hurt him, maybe, or scream at him until his throat went hoarse - but despite how angry Guts looks, he’s merely standing there, watching Griffith watch him.

“I came to you so I could know for certain whether anything can shake my heart… and as I’m standing here, in this new body, I feel… nothing.”

Guts’ mouth drops open like he might say something, but he only looks down and away. Although his fists clench and his jaw works soundlessly in frustration, he’s quiet.

Griffith wants Guts to say something. He wants Guts to look at him again.

The wind blows over the hilltop, kicking up the powdery snow.

“Why did you do it?”

Griffith’s head tilts to the side, “Hmm?”

“Why did you do it? Why did you kill them, everyone?” Guts’ voice raises as he speaks, that barely contained anger beginning to spill over.

“I had to, for the sake of my dream. It was the only way.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Griffith pauses. He doesn’t feel right, telling Guts this, but then again, why should it matter to him whether Guts knows even a part of what happened during the Eclipse? Griffith shouldn’t care. “You remember how I was back then, don’t you? I couldn’t even talk or move on my own. There was no hope for me.”

Guts seethes, “You mean for _him_. You’re not Griffith. You’re not the Griffith I knew.”

“I am, and I’m not.”

“Quit talkin’ in riddles!” He yells, fingers tightening around the hilt of his sword.

That tightening of fingers, the briefest display of fury, makes Griffith blink. There’s a feeling tugging deep in his chest, but he ignores it. “I’m the same Griffith, changed. I gave you and the others up so I could mend the weakness of my human heart. I’m free.”

“But they all died. Everyone except me. You - you didn’t -” Guts scowls, “why’d you leave me alive? Why didn’t you kill me with the rest of them?”

Griffith can’t think of what to say. An excuse would be easy enough - he didn’t need Guts to die in order to sacrifice him, he’d end up dead with the rest someday - but the fact that he knows intrinsically that anything he could offer would be an excuse has him flustered.

He stares Guts dead on. “It’s just like that other time when we fought Zodd together… do I need a reason? Do I need a reason for sparing you?”

Guts’ face contorts, his brows drawing down and eyes widening and lips pulling back to bare his teeth. “That’s all you have to say? You put me through all this shit, and that’s all you have to say?!”

“Would you like me to say something else?”

“You killed everyone. Judeau, Pippin, even Casca… everyone… and you don’t even care at all, do you? Why couldn’t you just finish me off, too? What difference does it make?”

Griffith can feel his own breath picking up speed, a faint thumping resounding in his chest, echoing off his ribcage. “I could never hurt you. Not really.”

“So you left me to get eaten alive by your fucking demons and be chased down night after night by them until I die? What a great alternative that is.”

Griffith doesn’t answer. His heart is pounding in his chest, a foreign feeling. This isn’t supposed to be happening. None of this is supposed to be happening.

“I don’t get it. I should have died. If you don’t care anymore, you should have let me die with the rest of them. Why me?” Guts voice goes quiet at the end, dropping in tone guiltily. He remembers Corkus making fun of him, calling him “the special one” and “Griffith’s favourite”, and how Rickert told him that when he left, Griffith couldn’t handle it. Even Casca had said Griffith treated Guts differently than anyone else - she, too, didn’t know why, why him, why Griffith chose him over everyone, always.

Griffith looks up, watching the snow beginning to fall from the sky. His words, for the first time since he was human, sound tentative and unsure, “I thought you might understand. You, of all people.”

A shadow drops, cloaking Guts in darkness. He whips around, drawing his sword just as another strikes the weakened blade, singing along the blunt edge.

Zodd laughs as he strikes again, “I’m surprised you’ve survived this long, boy! I was worried we’d never get to finish our fight.”

Guts puts all his confusion and rage into his swings, leaving himself nearly unguarded as he pushes Zodd back through the field of swords. Griffith stares, enthralled, his eyes following Guts’ every movement, from the way he blinks the snow off his eyelashes to the strain along his shoulder muscles as he struggles to defend against Zodd’s blows.

Once again, it feels like Griffith’s been here before. He thinks of the first time he ever saw Guts, from atop that stormed barrack, catching the gleam of the sun off the metal straps of Guts’ ill-fitting helmet. When he watched Guts cleave Bazuso in two, he felt like a man possessed, unable to look away.

Guts winces as he bends to avoid Zodd’s sword, the wound in his side bleeding anew. He looks pale, and Griffith can see he’s losing blood fast, the exertion of the fight tearing the scabbed skin. Stumbling, Guts’ knees nearly buckle beneath him as Zodd pushes him back.

Although he never told Zodd he shouldn’t interrupt, and although he anticipated Zodd would desire to resume his rivalry with Guts, Griffith suddenly feels his heart pick up the pace once more, as it had when Guts yelled at him. Images of red blood on white snow and Guts’ itchy cloak run up and centre in his mind as his pulse stirs.

His eyes narrow into a glare and Zodd seems to sense it immediately, halting mid-swing to look at Griffith. There’s blood dripping from Guts’ temple and he has to lean on his sword to stand, staring at Griffith through the flurry of snow, an unspoken question in his eye.

“We’re leaving,” Griffith says to Zodd, turning away from Guts as Zodd reaches out to help Griffith onto his back

“Wait! Where’re you going?!” Guts calls after him, footsteps heavy as he struggles across the hilltop towards Griffith.

Griffith glances back at him once more, taking in his swelling eye, the cuts on his forehead and cheeks, the sickly pallor of his skin. He’s slowly dying, Griffith can tell. It won’t be much longer before he runs himself into the ground and grinds himself into dust.

The painful beating in his chest still won’t slow.

“Wait! Don’t go! _Griffith_!”

That scream seems to bounce off every tree, every mound of snow, even the tiny flakes falling from the sky. Griffith doesn’t look back. He doesn’t want to know what Guts looks like right now.

The last time Griffith argued with Guts on a snowy hill like this, he was abandoned. Now, Guts is the one being left behind. It doesn’t bite back like Griffith thought it would - there’s no satisfaction in leaving Guts like Guts left him. There’s only a hollowness in his chest and an ache in his throat which tightens the further away from Guts he goes.


	7. beast of darkness.

But this is fitting punishment,  
To live and love in vain,--  
O my wrung heart, be thou content,  
And feed upon his pain.

\- "Revenge", Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

 

Biting cold kisses Guts’ cheeks, snowflakes swirling in the wind around him as he, helpless to do anything, watches Griffith leave. His whole body feels frozen, frost-laden and heavy. Zodd’s wings carry Griffith deeper into the white clouds blanketed over the mountain until he disappears, fading away like the remnants of a dream.  
  
“Guts!” Rickert yells, leaning out from the doorway of Godo’s hut. From his side he can only see Guts stooped over, curled in on himself in the snow like a huddled child.  
  
Guts lifts his head, remembering where he is and that only a few steps away Erica and Rickert have been watching this whole time. Even with them close by, he still manages to feel completely, utterly alone.  
  
“That thing… that was Nosferatu Zodd, wasn’t it? I saw him outside the Eclipse, fighting the Skull Knight,” Rickert runs to Guts’ side, stopping short of reaching out a hand to help Guts’ up. He hesitates on his next words, “Tell me what’s happening, Guts. Why is Griffith back and why is he with Zodd? I thought you said we’d never see Griffith again.”  
  
With all the lethargy of an old man, Guts rises to his feet wordlessly, eyes cast downward, and limps into Godo’s hut. The crack in his sword runs completely down the side now, threatening to split in the middle and stained with Zodd’s blood. Guts himself feels like he’s splitting, like there’s a chisel stuck in his breast bone cracking his ribs open with every breath he takes.  
  
The chair creaks under him as he sits with a long, shaky exhale. His fingers are trembling and he’s not sure whether it’s the pain and exhaustion, or something else entirely. He can barely move.  
  
Rickert follows him, trying to meet Guts’ one good eye. “Guts?”  
  
“I need you to fix my sword. Fix it, and I’ll tell you.”

* * *

  
He presses his cheek against the warm stones of the fireplace, the whole forge lit with orange and gold flame. How long has it been since he last slept? It would be so easy, to close his eyes and lean his weight on the wall and forget, but whenever he begins to nod off, the clang of hammer against sword jolts him back to himself.  
  
Rickert presses the fuller into the blade, tiny arms shuddering under the weight. During his year away from the Hawks with Godo, Guts had become privy to some knowledge about smithing, but he’d never held much of an interest in it. Under Godo’s tutelage, Rickert seems to have become a professional.  
  
“You’ve sure learned a lot. Godo must have been really on your ass these past few months, huh?” Guts says, voice raised over the smoke.  
  
Rickert pauses, hands lifting away from the spring swage slowly. “Months…? Guts, it’s been almost two years.”  
  
Guts’ eyebrows draw together, eyes narrowing as he stares at Rickert. Surely, he must be joking.  
  
“How long did you think you’d been gone?” Rickert sets down his tools and looks at Guts as though he’s unrecognizable.  
  
“I don’t know. I thought… I thought about four months, maybe. There’s no way it’s been two years. Has it?” Guts’ eye falls down to his one good hand, staring into the lines in his palm and the dirt crusted between his knuckles, as though that would tell him the answer. Truth be told, he honestly doesn’t know how long it’s been. He never thought about it. When he first left Godo’s cabin, it had been a snowy day, like this, and he’s seen snow again between summer rain and dying leaves since then. Has he not noticed even the passing of time during those long nights searching for Griffith?  
  
“Yeah, Guts. Two years. What were you even doing out there in all this time?”  
  
Guts draws his hand back into his lap, his fingers clenching in on themselves. “Killing apostles. Looking for him.”  
  
“For Griffith? I don’t understand. He looks so different from how he was before… he can walk again, and speak. He’s not…” Rickert stops himself short, turning to face Guts with ire in his eyes. “What happened that day when everyone died? Why won’t you tell me?  
  
For a long time, Guts is silent. He looks at his hands, the floor, his half-finished sword, anywhere but Rickert, scared to have to say what Griffith did to him, to all of them. He doesn’t want to admit it out loud. Finally, he takes a deep breath.  
  
“That necklace Griffith had, the behelit, it summoned these things called the God Hand. They told us that Griffith would sacrifice us so he could become like them - angels, or demons, or whatever they were. Griffith was scared like the rest of us. He didn’t want to do it, but they took him away and closed him off from the rest of us, and when they spat him out, he… he wasn’t human anymore,” Guts swallows. “I don’t know what they did to him, or if the Griffith that came here today is even the one we used to know. All I know is that he let us all die in exchange for what he is now. That’s what he wanted.”  
  
Rickert drops to his knees, eyes wide and scared. Watching him, Guts can’t feel anything at all besides the sour taste of regret.  
  
“...How did you make it out alive?”  
  
“I was the only one left when the new Griffith came. He just stared at me. Even when I escaped, he didn’t do anything but stare. I don’t know why.”  
  
Rickert sniffles, tears prickling at the corners of his eyes that he quickly wipes away with his calloused palms. In all this time, Guts has never allowed himself to cry over what happened. He wonders how many times Rickert must have cried for the dead Hawks in his place.  
  
“And once I finish this sword, you’re leaving again, aren’t you?” Rickert asks. Guts doesn’t answer, which is answer enough. “I have to come with you! For two years you carried that heavy burden alone, and I… I just stayed here, comfortable by myself in this place. I was a hawk, too! Take me with you!”  
  
“No.”  
  
Rickert staggers back, “What - why not?”  
  
“I told you before, you’ll die if you come. And now with Godo gone, who’s going to look after Erica? You have her, and the forge - there’s too much holding you down here. Besides, you could never hate Griffith enough.”  
  
“Do you hate Griffith?”  
  
Guts grinds his teeth, scraping his molars against the inside of his mouth until the tinny taste of blood swells over his tongue. The wind swirls the snow down in curls from the heavy clouds above. Guts looks out the window and shudders.

* * *

  
The familiar weight of a sword on his back is all that tethers Guts to the world around him. It hasn’t stopped snowing since he watched Griffith leave him on that hill, and the smoke from Godo’s forge mixes with the white and grey, both waning against the impenetrable woolly sky. He’d left in silence after thanking Rickert for repairing his sword, but unlike the first time he set out to find Griffith after the Eclipse, he kept looking back behind him. Wondering, perhaps, if he’d see someone following him - maybe Rickert or even Griffith, returned to speak with him again.  
  
He doesn’t know why he keeps running after Griffith like this, expecting, hoping he will tell Guts the truth, or give him a reason for keeping him alive all this time.  
  
When he really thinks about it, Guts supposes he can understand the Eclipse. It’s just like Griffith told him on the hill - he had been completely broken that year he spent tortured in the tower, and the only way to retrieve what he’d lost was to make the sacrifice for his dream. Guts can remember what Griffith said to the princess so many years ago: the people who chose to follow Griffith, in turn, chose to die for his ambition. Griffith’s dream was his lifeblood, and without it, he’d said he’d be as good as dead, living only to see another day. People who lacked a dream could never be Griffith’s true friend. That’s why Guts left the Hawks to find a dream of his own; he wanted Griffith to see him, really see him, and think of him as an equal.  
  
He should have expected that, when faced with a choice between them and his dream, Griffith would pick the latter. Griffith said himself that it was in his nature, right? Guts doesn’t like it, but he thinks he gets it, knows what Griffith was thinking when he made that choice.  
  
What he still doesn’t understand, even after all this time chasing Griffith in hopes of an answer, is why he’s still alive. Griffith has power beyond even Guts’ own comprehension now. Griffith could kill him in an instant, and Guts thought he would, during the Eclipse. But for some reason Griffith spared him. Guts is beginning to think it’s his punishment for leaving Griffith all those years ago - Griffith was trapped and tortured after (or maybe because?) Guts left him, and now Guts is being made to suffer a similar fate. A fate there seems to be no end to.  
  
Guts is beginning to lose a sense of everything that isn’t intrinsically tied to this search for Griffith. He hardly even felt the wound in his chest gleaned from falling off the Tower of Conviction, and nearly two years have passed since the Eclipse without him noticing. It’s like he’s scooping out his own insides more and more frantically as time drones on, becoming a hollow effigy of himself. At the rate he’s going, he has no future beyond his present, where he is caught up in dwelling on the past.  
  
His time in the Band of the Hawk seems like the glowing golden age of his life, just a distant memory now. He gave that up, lost it when he made the decision to leave Griffith on that snowy hill that day. If he had never left, would he still be there, riding alongside Griffith and Casca into battle, leading the Raiders? The God Hand said that the Eclipse was fated to happen, but was it Guts who truly pushed those events into motion?  
  
He knows everyone’s dead because of Griffith’s decision, that it was Griffith who made his life become… this. Yet there is a blurred doubt in the back of Guts’ mind that makes him think it was his own fault. Even when he was a child, death followed him everywhere - he had been born from the hanged corpse of his own mother, raised by a woman who died screaming his name, then taken in by Gambino, who Guts killed with his own sword. The men in Gambino’s band of mercenaries had called Guts a cursed child and a bad omen. Maybe they were right. Everyone Guts cares for dies a horrible, untimely death while he continues on living, struggling in the mud pointlessly and alone.  
  
With the burden of the sacrifice brand, his curse is more palpable than ever. His mere presence draws demons and monsters, putting anyone around him in jeopardy, whether he knows them or not. Guts is a walking, talking harbinger of death.  
  
He’s beginning to wonder if Griffith is dead, too. Guts knew from the moment he saw that new Griffith on the hill, the emptiness in his eyes, that the creature that stared back at him was a stranger. I _gave you and the others up so I could mend the weakness of my human heart_ , that’s what Griffith had said, and, _I’m free_. If he no longer feels anything, is he really even Griffith anymore? Or did the recognizable parts of him die during the Eclipse - or, perhaps earlier, when he was locked away in that tower?  
  
Guts’ eye is sliding shut again, feet stumbling over a tree root raised from underneath the snowy forest floor. He’s tired, and night is falling, but he can’t stop here. If he stops to rest now, all the souls of those who have died lost in these woods will flock to him.  
  
Maybe their meeting on the hill was a test. Maybe, Griffith doubted his own lack of humanity and thought that if seeing Guts couldn’t stir something in him, nothing would. Maybe Griffith is still his same old self, and he’s simply moved on. Maybe Guts failed his test.  
  
If that’s the case, then what is the point of Guts being back out here again, dragging his sword behind him in desperate attempts to find Griffith? It almost feels like that year after he’d left the Hawks, searching for a dream of his own in hopes that he would finally be able to prove himself to Griffith. Guts can’t shake that old part of himself that still wants Griffith to notice him.  
  
If Griffith doesn’t even consider him worth looking at anymore, then Guts will make Griffith look at him again. There’s nothing else he can do, with this brand, this curse.  
  
The howling of wolves bays somewhere deeper in the forest as the pale moon begins to peek through the trees. Guts limbs have never felt so heavy, his mind fogging with the veneer of exhaustion as spots dot across his blurry vision. The ground rushes up to meet him, and he’s asleep before he can feel his cheek make contact with the snow.

* * *

  
There’s something sticky soaked up to his knees. Wet, hot, and saccharine, the smell of rusted metal and the bitten inside of jaws, snapped-off and red. Pants of burning breath baste over his forehead, a single glowing eye blinking at him, rising and falling with the laboured inhale and exhale.  
  
_Look at you._  
  
Within the stinging rays of red light from the moonless, sunless sky, the faint shadow of a dog crosses its paws one over the other, blood clinging to its fur.  
  
_Look at your world, how small and sad and inconsequential it is. You don’t even know how to live in it anymore, not since he did this to you. Crawling in the darkness, just like those monsters you fight… are you no longer human?_  
  
Guts steps back, feet sloshing in the heat beneath him.  
  
_You stink. You stink of darkness. All the apostles you kill, all the people you let die, just to settle your own grudge… their blood pools at your feet. It stains you._  
  
The beast stands, sending waves of blood rippling, lapping against Guts’ thighs.  
  
_You’re all alone. Always alone. And still, he hates you, when all you want is for him to see you._  
  
Light flickers, then dies. Shadow descends, the dog yoked within it, swirling in that darkness.  
  
_Go, go find him. Take all those dark emotions you don’t want to feel and let them consume you, then nothing will hurt anymore. Like that wound in your side from the tower, the wound you couldn’t feel because all your thoughts were on him. The way he gave up his feelings, and you. Nothing will hurt anymore._  
  
_Take that sword and ram it right through him… force him to look at you, like he used to. Isn’t that what you want?_

* * *

  
The first thing he sees as he jolts awake are two blue eyes staring at him.  
  
He’s collapsed on the ground, limbs splayed and crumpled weakly, his breath coming out in icy puffs against the frozen ground. Those two eyes watch him, surrounded by the spilt contents of his bag. They are the unmoving eyes of the behelit, lying mere inches from his face.  
  
Guts’ hands shake uncontrollably, and though his bones creak from the cold, he’s sweating all over. Like it’s laughing at him, the behelits eyes curve into slits, skin creasing at the corners.  
  
The Skull Knight’s words resonate in his mind - the behelit is waiting for Guts to reach his breaking point, when he’s overcome with despair and powerlessness. The worst is still yet to come, but Guts can’t imagine his life being much worse than this.  
  
How much longer could he go on like this? How many more monsters would he have to kill, before he finally reaches Griffith?  
  
In the end, it doesn’t matter what Guts does. He’s doomed to hell anyway thanks to the brand of sacrifice. But if there’s one thing he can do, just one, it’s drag Griffith down there with him.  
  
Yet, Guts still doesn’t know if that’s what he wants.

* * *

  
Men lined up and shot, their corpses heaved over the edge of a hole swarming with half-rotten bodies. Women tied to a rope and yanked along by soldiers like wild animals on a leash. Children blubbering and sobbing as they watch parents and siblings alike cleaved in two, stabbed and impaled and staked. Innocent people tortured and killed as the conquering Kushan general watches on from his seat above the fray.  
  
The world has not changed at all in the two years Griffith was gone.  
  
One of the women spots him as he guides his horse down the cobblestone path up to the city’s fortress. The other women follow her gaze, faces contorting into equal parts hope and awe. Her jaw drops when he passes, her voice hardly more than a whisper when she asks, “Is it… is it really him?”  
  
He kills the conquering general with one stroke of his sword. It’s so easy. The world seems to mould itself around his intent, and every move he wishes to make just happens, without even the will of his own body.  
  
There’s a disconnect between himself and his actions, now. He doesn’t even need to plan out what he’ll do next, he can simply decide in the moment, because fate and destiny all ride on the backs of his decisions. What is meant to happen will happen - there’s a certain security in knowing that. But at the same time, there exist tiny moments where he is frustrated. What is the point if it’s all so easy?  
  
Perhaps he’s just so used to having to fight for what he wants that the concept of gaining something freely is jarring. He’ll get used to it, he’s sure. It’s inconsequential, anyway - the outcome is what matters, not the process.  
  
Zodd breaks through the city walls and begins to pick off the Kushan soldiers, while Griffith waits. The other apostles will be here soon, his presence like a siren’s call that draws them ever closer. All of it so effortless, his plans falling into place without him even having to lift a finger or soil his own hands. The deaths of countless men, piling on top of each other, robbed of breath because Griffith has willed it to be so - this, this infallible power and coldness, is what he made his sacrifice for.  
  
A distant memory bubbles to the surface at that thought. He remembers standing in a dark forest, the wind blowing his hair into his face, and Guts beside him. He’d asked Guts, then, if Guts thought of him as cruel, as despicable for making Guts do his dirty work. Guts never said no. He just said that he had no right to judge Griffith, seeing himself as no better.  
  
Griffith wonders if maybe that’s a reason Guts left him.  
  
In his preoccupation, Griffith doesn’t notice the two men about to pounce on him from behind. A long, whip-like arm slaps the two away, casting them back, while the owner of the arm approaches. He wears a mask and black cloak, the squirming mass of limbs hidden underneath quivering against the fabric.  
  
“I felt you’d be here,” the apostle says, then its voice drops. “You’re so lovely…”  
  
It stares at him from behind its mask, and Griffith can feel its gaze flitting over his body.  
  
“Someday, I’ll lop off your head and make it mine.”  
  
Griffith smiles. What an empty threat. Nothing can hurt him now.  
  
“But until then, I’ll serve you dutifully,” it adds, before turning back to join the clashing armies.  
  
One by one, the apostles arrive, slaughtering the Kushans mercilessly. Unlike them, Griffith feels no particular joy or exhilaration from the messy show of violence. He just wants them to finish so he can continue on.  
  
As sunset begins to crack over the horizon, the spray of blood and snapping of bones ceases, each apostle lowering themselves onto their knees, head bowed in submission to their godly master. Griffith doesn’t look at any of them.  
  
A single hawk rounds over the distant mountains, where that blacksmith’s hut lies. Perhaps Guts is there, Griffith thinks, sitting by a warm fire, resting while his wounds heal. There is a tug in Griffith’s chest.  
  
The dead wind whistles hollowly through the citadel, mingling with the screams of war prisoners running away, their jailers lying dead in the streets. Yet still, a long, desolate note, the world’s lonely silence, rings in Griffith’s ears.


	8. whore princess.

And now that I can weep no more  
The tears that gave relief of yore,  
And now, that from my ruined heart  
The forms that make me shudder, start _—_

          - "The Still Small Voice", John Rollin Ridge

 

“Of all places, I did not expect to encounter you here.”

The voice comes along the wind with a cold puff of air and the sound of a horse dashing its hooves against the thick underbrush. Guts angles his head towards it, still collapsed on the ground, his breath heavy with nerves after hearing the words of the dog from his dream. With a grunt, Guts draws himself up to lean against a nearby tree, shoving his meager belongings back into his bag as the glowing violet of the Skull Knight’s eyes stare down at him.

“Yeah? And what are you doin’ here, out in the middle of nowhere? There an apostle around?” Guts replies, rubbing the dirt off his face from where his cheek had been pressed into the ground. He felt a bit ashamed, knowing that the Skull Knight was seeing him like this. He didn’t have to see himself to know he was in rough shape.

“These woods are under the protection of a witch - apostles do not roam here without express purpose. I’ve come to visit said witch,” the low groan of old metal skidding against old metal resounds as the Skull Knight’s armoured hands move to lower his horse’s reins. “And, I felt the stir of a behelit nearby. It led me to you. Why are you here?”

Guts scratches the back of his neck. There is a long moment of silent pause where he is unsure of how to start explaining himself.

“I was at Godo’s place. Griffith came to find me there. He just wanted to talk, said he was trying to see if he had any feelings left over from when he was his old self. But there was nothing,” Guts’ voice is imbued with defeat.

“Interesting, that he would believe emotion is still something he might experience. He knows better than anyone that he tore his own heart asunder during the Eclipse. Something may have happened during the Incarnation Ceremony to make him think otherwise.”

Guts cannot stop the flutter of hope in his chest, “Like what?”

“I cannot say for certain, it is merely speculation. Perhaps, when he awoke and saw you, he was reminded of the past. Or maybe when he watched you fall from the Tower of Conviction he was jolted.” Guts looks down at the wound in his side, still aching. “I think it is more likely, however, that he sought you out not to test his own humanity, but as part of some greater motive. Did he speak of anything else?”

“Uh… not really. Zodd jumped in and challenged me halfway through the conversation, then Griffith called him off and said they had to go. I don’t know what he would have wanted from me.”

An expression on the Skull Knight’s eternally expressionless face breaks out at those words, akin to amusement. “Nosferatu Zodd was with Femto? How fitting, that he should become a drudge.”

Guts’ eyebrows furrow. “You know him?”

“Yes. He and I are sworn enemies, and rivals in battle just as you and he are. Our enmity has spanned many centuries.”

It’s odd, to think that the Skull Knight has any sort of relationship with anyone. He always appeared in Guts’ mind as a tenebrous, enigmatic figure who wandered from place to place, looking for apostles like Guts did. The Skull Knight is the person Guts has talked to the most these past two years, yet Guts doesn’t know anything about him at all.

Guts has never really understood what the Skull Knight wants from him, and why he seems to always help Guts whenever they meet. It has to be more than simple coincidence that they so often cross paths - sure, they have a similar goal in wiping out apostles, but even so, the Skull Knight finds Guts in even the most random of places.

“So who’s this witch lady you’re meeting?”

“Her name is Flora. She is very powerful and very old.”

“How old is ‘very old’?”

“Several hundred years. I knew her when she was a young girl."

“Damn. Several hundred, huh…” Guts couldn’t imagine living for that long. He was only in his early twenties, and he already felt so old, so tired and done. He doubted he’d make it more than a couple years down the line before he was eaten by an apostle or succumbed to the wounds he’s beginning to accumulate. How someone could stand to live centuries longer than that was unfathomable to him.

The Skull Knight doesn’t need to kick at his horse’s sides or tug on its reins, it merely moves forward of its own accord when the Skull Knight deems it time to take his leave. “Perhaps you should come to meet Flora as well. She could help you treat that wound in your side.”

Guts threaded his eyebrows together for a moment, confused as to how Skull Knight would have known about that. It wasn’t as if the blood was seeping through his shirt now, or that Guts was in obvious pain. Perhaps, like with so many other things Skull Knight does and knows, it’s just another mystery Guts isn’t privy to.

As eager as Guts is to get back on the road again, especially now that he knows where Griffith will be, after collapsing from exhaustion he knows better than to test his luck. It would be beneficial to get rid of this stupid cut on his ribs, because he’ll probably encounter hordes of apostles on his way back to Midland’s castle town, and going into a fight already bleeding will only slow him down.

He walks alongside the Skull Knight’s horse, watching its breath swirl into fog as it hit the cold air. With the approaching dawn, a strange mist is laying over the forest floor, smothering the tangled underbrush. It creeps alongside Guts’ feet, clinging to the undersides of his shoes with each step he takes like it’s drawn to him. There’s something ominous in the way it glows below the cloaked sun.

* * *

Griffith’s cape billows behind him in the blustering wind, the low rumble of thunder picking up miles away as rain begins to pelt down, slicking his hair to his forehead. He scuffs his boot against the stone ledge he’s balanced on. Through the window, he can see the faint outline of the princess illuminated by firelight, her fingers deftly weaving in and out on a small embroidery board.

He should go inside. That’s the whole reason he’s even come here - to see the princess, assure her that he wasn’t dead after all. The fastest way to the throne is through marriage, and wasn’t that his original plan, anyway? Rise through the ranks with military power, woo the princess, marry into the royal family, wait for the king to die, and then inherit the throne. He had been so close before, and he was even closer now. The king's already dead, all he has to do is marry Charlotte.

Still, he finds himself wavering at the window pane, unwilling to pass over into her room. This is all so familiar. Griffith remembers the rain hitting his cheeks when he’d stood outside Charlotte’s quarters the day Guts left him like it’s a mirror of the current moment. How eager he’d been, then, to escape that feeling of loss, his tears mixing with the rainwater as he smiled for Charlotte and assured her everything would be alright. How desperate he had been to console himself.

Everything he sees and feels now is a memory of itself, and it all just reminds him of the past, when he was human. He’s like a ghost of his old self, haunting the same places, doing the same things, with only the cold, leftover ambitions he once felt to guide him. Even becoming king is a goal that seems too far in the past. He isn’t sure he cares about that anymore, though he knows he should. But knowing and feeling is not the same. None of this - not the battles against the Kushans, assembling his new band of apostles, or even coming to meet Charlotte - none of it means anything to him. It doesn’t make him feel accomplished. It doesn’t make him feel anything.

This is what he wanted: a life without emotion to cloud his thoughts, or conscience to spurn his actions. But this aching, yawning emptiness within him is eating him from inside. Is there a point in doing any of this if it is all so dull and meaningless? His dream to have a kingdom was born out of passion, a desire for equality and success, yet he feels no passion now. He’s just a doll being puppeteered by the goals of his dead past.

Since being reborn into this body, he’s only been moved to true emotion by one thing, one person. It’s been days since that meeting on the hill of swords, and still, every time Griffith stops to let himself think, his mind always moves back to it, to the feeling of his heart beating and the panic squirming in him when he saw the trickle of blood run down Guts’ side, the malice in Zodd’s eyes and felt that paralyzing fear, that fear that if he didn’t stop Zodd, Guts might -

Griffith steps over the threshold and into Charlotte’s room. The wood in the fireplace crackles quietly, the sound of the rain outside softens as Griffith closes the window behind him. Charlotte halts her anxious needling, her gaze drawing up to the place where Griffith stands. Her jaw slackens.

“I ask your pardon, princess, for entering without your permission once again… could you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

With a harsh tremble in her wrists, she drops her sewing needle and reaches out for Griffith, her big brown eyes wide. “Lord Griffith…? Is it really…?”

Suddenly, her lower lip starts to falter, and the light from the fireplace makes her pooling tears look red. “It can’t be… this must be a dream. It has to be. Awake or asleep, all I think about is you - perhaps I lost track of what’s real, and now my dreams manifest into reality,” she sniffles, “I mean, something like this is almost too much to be real, isn’t it? A princess waiting for her knight to come and rescue her… even I know how childish that is.”

Griffith moves to sit near her on the bed, watching as she clutches the needle in her hand tighter, pricking the tip of her finger until blood dribbles down. Her voice is a whisper, “Under the moonlight, you look just like before. Please,” her breath catches, “please, don’t leave me like you did last time. Don’t disappear. I don’t want to wake up from this dream to see you gone again.”

He moves to hold her bleeding finger, raising it up, outstretched. “Is this pain a dream? Isn’t it real?”

“Y-yes.”

“Then so am I.”

She sobs and shoves her head into his chest, against the cold plate of armour covering his unbeating heart. Almost as an afterthought, he wraps his arms around her, smoothing down her hair. With the way her head is tilted, he can only see the deep brown of her pupils, brimming with tears.

There’s another pair of eyes that same brown he remembers staring into so many times before. Something in his chest stirs.

“Oh, Lord Griffith… ever since you left, I think I really have been living in a dream. I couldn’t think of anything but you,” she murmurs.

Griffith feels as though he’s been dreaming in all this time, too. He feels so numb, detached, isolated from everything around him, like it’s just set dressing and he’s an actor in the midst of it all, playing his part.

“I missed you so much…”

Her words fall markless on his ears. He feels absolutely nothing.

“I’m here now,” he says, trying to inject sincerity in his tone, “I won’t leave.”

“Now we can finally be together,” she sighs, closing her eyes. Griffith’s hand clenches.

Deep in his sternum, he feels a tug, so sharp it makes his head snap up. He can feel a rift forming, ripping a hole in the fabric of this physical world and letting a part of the astral plane ooze inside. Turning to look out the window and past the spires of buildings bordering the tower, he sees, in the distant forest, a thick layer of mist settling in. The presence sinking in there is dark and heavy, and most of all, familiar.

Zodd’s claws dig into the thatched roof, tearing off the stone and wood until the space above Charlotte’s bed stares up right into the night sky. With a few strong beats of his wings, Zodd lifts the two of them up and out of the tower, carrying Charlotte’s bed below him as he steers his course far away.

“Take her to the castle, and guard the entrance,” Griffith tells Zodd, his eyes still trained on the forest cloaked with mist. It was right outside that blacksmith’s home. “I’ll come and join you soon. There’s something I need to deal with.”

* * *

Though Guts could have sworn he’d seen the sun rising mere minutes ago, the woods remained dark and desolate. Since he’d awoken, he had not seen a single animal scurrying over the ground or birds singing in the trees. Everything, from the coiling vines at his feet blanketed by thick mist to the trees that groaned under the faint wind, seemed frozen in time, void of life.

Perhaps the Skull Knight feels the change because his glowing eyes dart over the landscape before them. His eyes eventually land on the bag at Guts’ side, slung over his shoulders. “Your behelit is humming with more energy than when last I saw you. It is so strong now that it even led me right to you. I’m sure other creatures attuned to its sound would be able to use it to track you down, as well.”

This spooks Guts. If it was to the point where the behelit practically screamed its location out for everyone to hear, was he past the point of trying to get rid of it? He’d thought it was best to keep it himself, just so nobody else could find it and use it, but maybe that idea wasn’t even his own. Maybe, like with so many other things that have happened in his life, this was just another act of fate that he was doomed to, and incapable of stopping.

He thinks of the way he collapsed the night before, and of the strange dream he had. That beast in the darkness encouraging him to go after Griffith felt just as real as anything else he’d experienced. Was it a vision birthed by the behelit? Or something else entirely?

“With the strength the behelit currently holds, its opening may be imminent,” the Skull Knight warns. “Guts. If you choose to accept the offers of the God Hand and prepare a sacrifice, we will become enemies. You will be no different from any other apostle. I will aim to kill you with every encounter we have thenceforth.”

The Skull Knight’s voice is laced with an air of finality. Guts grits his teeth, “I won’t become like them. I don’t care what they do to me, or what stupid deals they try to push me into making. I’ll die before I live as an apostle. Don’t lump me in with ‘em.”

“Yes. You have managed to evade the flow of causality in the past, so it is possible that you shall refuse the sacrifice. But the God Hand are designated to give reason to human suffering and to help those marked by the behelits transcend beyond their human forms to a state of corruption that defies humanity, and if you have been fated to become an apostle, you shall experience that same corruption. Or perhaps the behelit may never open at all. It is beyond the scope of my knowledge.”

Guts trembles with anger. To live miserably like this, vying after Griffith for years without knowing whether the demon that wore his face was even really him at all, his own body degenerating under the stress of fighting apostles and sleepless nights, suffering meaninglessly with nothing to show for it, only for it all to end with him becoming one of the monsters he’s devoted his life to killing? Was that what he was destined for? Is that what he has been ordained by fate to succumb to?

If a day ever came where Guts was faced with the God Hand, what would they offer him in return for his sacrifice? What does he even _want_?

There’s never been much that could sway Guts’ actions to follow his desires. Except for those brief few years spent in the Band of the Hawk, Guts has lived life directionless, wandering from battlefield to battlefield. Well, when he thinks about it, that’s not entirely true - since he met Griffith, his life has been imbued with some sense of purpose. First, it was playing his role as a piece of the equation that would have led up to Griffith’s dream, and now, it was hunting Griffith down. But to what end? The question has been haunting him since Griffith left him in the snow, and now it grows stronger with the words of the dreamed-beast lingering in his mind. If Griffith were in front of him, at this very moment, what would Guts do?

“We have arrived,” the Skull Knight announces, pulling the reins on his horse. Before them sits a house of knotted roots, nestled in the foliage of a grand tree stretching up towards the heavens. The oppressive mist thins near the entrance, but beneath the fog Guts can see the limbs of spiders darting in and out of the grass, all heading in the same direction, single file, like a line of marching soldiers, toward the darkest reaches of the forest. Guts shivers.

He climbs the stairs up to the door, but it’s already half swung open. Shadows shroud the interior, concealing the shapes of the entryway. Guts steps over the threshold, feeling that same darkness he’d seen deep in the woods overcome him as he moves deeper into the house. Wildflowers fill vases lining the floor, but they are wilted and dying, seeming to stoop under the weight of the shadows. Where light should stream in from the blue and green stained glass windows, only the cloying mist outside can be seen.

From out of the corner of his eye, Guts sees a limp hand strewn across the hardwood. Following it up he sees paper thin, wrinkled skin slipping out from beneath a woolen shawl, the buttons of a worn cotton dress twisted sideways, revealing an old woman’s pale face, her neck jerked unnaturally to the side.

The Skull Knight is silent behind him. Guts can see the woman’s blank, glassy eyes reflect the gleam of his drawn sword, staring without focus out the window at the clouding fog.

Strangely, the brand on the back of his neck feels not even a prick of pain. A death as strange and unnatural as this would draw suspicion to some non-human entity, an apostle or spirit, but Guts remains unhurt.

The Skull Knight leans down beside her body, gloved hands turning her neck so he might inspect the fatal injury. Her skin is unblemished, not a single drop of blood hovering around her body, yet Guts hears a sickening crunch as the Skull Knight moves her, her bones rearranging inside her skin. Her spine looks completely shattered.

“The hell’s going on here?” Guts interjects, averting his gaze. Seeing an old woman killed so cleanly, so quietly, rubs him the wrong way. Everything about this feels wrong.

There’s a beat of silence wherein the Skull Knight seems contemplative. “I do not know. This… does not appear to be apostle-related,” he rises again to his feet. “Flora’s power was beyond measure, but she was still mortal. Though to have the bravery to enter her forests, provoking her, knowing full well the range of her ability - this must be something with either extreme confidence or foolishness.”

The body looks fresh. The wan pallor of the woman’s skin was not yet grey in colour, and flies hadn’t begun to gather around her. “Whatever did this is probably still lurking around,” Guts says. Slowly, the Skull Knight looks at him and nods.

“I’m gonna go look,” Guts mutters gruffly and turns away, eager to escape this macabre scene. He’s no stranger to corpses, but seeing an old lady dead with no wounds or markings on her body and the Skull Knight leaning over her mournfully puts a lump in Guts’ throat.

The mist is so thick that Guts nearly sputters when he takes a deep breath. It tastes like metal and honey, soft on the tongue yet suffocating, and it burns in his lungs like ash.  

Spiders and beetles and ants crawl over his boots toward that darkening spot in the forest. The shadowy penumbra is blurred at the edges, like ink on waterlogged paper. Numbing pain strikes through his skull the more he stares at it.

He hasn’t heard or seen a single animal since entering the forest, and he’s beginning to think he knows where they’ve all gone. That dark spot is sucking the life from the trees and the grass, drawing even the smallest of bugs and detritivores in. Around the shadowy mass, in a near perfect ring, the flowers and weeds have browned and shriveled, robbed of the lustrous green that hues the other plants only mere feet away. The verdant moss clinging to the trees is rife with rot.

Guts casts a glance behind him, noting that the Skull Knight still hasn’t emerged from the cottage.

He follows the path the spiders take and lets himself be drawn into the shadows, too. Hidden beneath a thicket of brambles and bushes is the wide-mouthed opening of a cave, and Guts feels as though it - or whatever is inside - is watching him expectantly. The rock ground is smooth and damp, the walls emanate an inexplicable heat. He walks through the halls, finding the barren corridors illuminated by glowing red light that bloats and fades in rhythm, like a faint heartbeat.

Each step further twists his insides. Nausea is sweeping over him and sweat beads at his brow, a phantom heaviness slowing his movements as the cave splits into a yawning chasm, the fissure seeming to reach down into the deepest reaches of the earth. If it weren’t for the steady trickle of water and the waves lapping against the rocky shore, he’d swear that if he looked straight down into the crack, he could see all the way to hell.

All is silent, save for the drip-drip of condensation rolling off of the jagged stalactites above the pool. Steam rises from the undulating surface, and under the pulsing red glow of the cave walls, the water appears bright red. Uncannily so, like the crimson sea bathing the black dog from his dream, or the lake of blood his friends leaked into during the Eclipse. He thinks he can see half-digested corpses bobbing along the surface, the blank eyes of stags and the stiff hooves of mountain goats - the forest, in its entirety, consumed and spat out.

A ripple shudders through the water, turning itself over like soup bubbling in a vat. Guts can see a figure ascend from the depths, long coils of dripping hair slicked against the soft shoulder blades of a woman, blood rivering down the long column of her spine, the slow, easy cadence of her breath basting over the cavern as the tortile innards of wolves and deer encase a body around her, forming the swell of her hips and the knowing smile set in her face.

Guts has to bite his tongue to keep from groaning at the pain that rips into him as the brand on his neck begins to gush blood. The bag at his side vibrates, and when he tears it open, he sees the face of the behelit rearranging, eyes over nose over mouth.

The woman stretches her arms above her, opening her vein-riddled eyes to stare down at Guts, and sighs out in rapture.

“Ah…” she rolls her shoulders, stretches her neck side to side, “it’s been so long since I’ve had a body of my own. Even the flesh and bone of animals is preferable to incorporeal existence - I envy that friend of yours for being reborn into a human form,” her voice is feather-light and lilting. Guts growls, teeth grinding when he recognizes the voice as Slan.

“He’s going to be upset at me for this,” she giggles, wading out of the shallows. Blood sloughs off her like an old snakeskin as she steps closer, arms outstretched as if to reach for him.

She means Griffith, doesn’t she? Guts narrows his eyes, equal parts fearful and enraged. What was to about to do to him that could possibly piss Griffith off? Why would Griffith care what she does at all? Griffith said himself he felt nothing for Guts anymore.

“I’ve been watching you,” she purrs at him, “each night, in that blacksmith’s cave and at the tower, through the eyes of every apostle you killed, I’ve always been there. I felt your loneliness, your anger, your suffering… even though I was never truly with you, I could feel you. Could you feel me?”

Guts looks down at the behelit in his bag, at its realigned face and the way its opened eyes blink up at him. Was this the moment the Skull Knight warned him of? Did fate bring him here because he was destined to become an apostle?

“You’re so quiet.” Her eyes follow his down to the behelit, and a smile lights up her face, “Oh, yes, the behelit. It hungers in your presence, and the longer it goes deprived, the hungrier it will become.”

“I know,” Guts spits back at her. He’s so fucking tired of being told this over and over, tired of being reminded that he has no control over the circumstances of his life.

“That hatred, that rage - it burns you, doesn’t it? It’s what keeps you alive,” she lurches forward like a pouncing cat, grabbing hold of Guts’ face, her blood-stained hands cupping his cheeks. He squeezes his eye shut and screams in agony as the brand seems to rip his veins from his very flesh at the contact. “Show me more.”

Her fingers ghost over his jaw, down his neck, and settle on his bicep, her sharp nails digging into the skin. She laughs, watching with glee how his brand smarts and bursts blood at the contact. His breastplate is ripped away, and her gaze drops down with it, eyes running along the expanse of his chest, up his sternum. Licking her lips, she draws her hand up, claws glinting in the red light, then bears down and scratches him deep across the breastbone.

The pain hits both inside and out. While he bleeds down his chest, his mind aches and his vision blurs, like a blinding light has flashed in front of him. He barely even hears her laugh over the sound of his own pounding heartbeat.

Were it not for her vice grip on him, he would stumble to the ground, the breath knocked straight from his lungs. He kicks and struggles but it only makes her hold him tighter, pressing his face into her neck and wrapping her arms around his waist. With the one hand still cupping his cheek, she brushes a stray piece of hair behind his ear, saying, “There… now you’ll have a scar from me. Every time you feel this pain in your chest, you’ll think of me.”

Guts eye begins to lull shut, his pain-blurred vision turning the throbbing cave into a thick soup of red. If he had the energy, he’d be kicking and shoving her away right now, but he’s pretty sure he’s moments away from passing out. He can’t even think.

A white light flashes behind him, reflected upon the still water and dripping wet walls. Slan’s fingers stop their stroking of his cheek, and he feels her chest flutter against him as she giggles airily once more.

“Femto. I didn’t expect you to come running so soon.” Guts can hear the smile in her words. His head snaps up, and her hold falters just enough that he has the leeway to turn, his breaths picking up speed when he sees the figure behind him.

Atop the rotting animal innards at the cavern’s lip, Griffith stands, unsullied. His gaze flits between the spot where Slan’s arm is wrapped around Guts’ waist, where she drapes her palm over Guts’ cheek, and the bleeding wound over Guts’ heart. Although his face holds the mask of indifference, Guts can see Griffith’s eyes on fire.

Slan leans closer, her lips grazing the shell of Guts’ ear, and whispers, “See - didn’t I tell you he’d be upset?”

Griffith says nothing. Guts nods off, jerking back up and willing his vision to focus through the blood loss and searing pain. His eyes meet with Griffith’s as he struggles to raise his shaking hands, and Griffith stares at him with such intensity that Guts feels his breath catch in his throat.

“Stab her, Guts,” Griffith says. "Your sword is tempered with the deaths of hundreds of spirits and apostles, and the form she's taken is unstable. Stab her."

Slan laughs, her bloodshot eyes squeezing half-shut. When she speaks her voice is low, and husky, “Yes, stab me. Impale me with your sword, darling.”

Guts tries to search Griffith’s face for an explanation - why he was helping Guts, if this was a trap, how he’d even known Guts was here - but Griffith’s expression is grim and impassive as ever.

With a grunt, Guts heaves the slab of iron up, draws back, then shoves the point deep into Slan’s stomach until he sees it appear out the other side. She cries out, back arching and nails digging into his back. The rudimentary form of her revolting figure begins to disintegrate, intestines unspooling from the flesh that comprises her thighs, her hips, her waist. She melts back into the pool of blood from whence she rose with a smile painting her lips.

“Good boy,” she murmurs. She leans in, so close her breath fans over Guts’ cheeks, and then, staring over his shoulder at Griffith, presses her lips to Guts’. In a splatter of blood, her stolen body falls to pieces.

Guts is left gaping at the place where she stood. He leans his weight against his sword, struggling to keep hold of his balance as he reels in the aftershock.

“Griffith -” he looks behind, finding Griffith watching him. Griffith’s eyebrows are knit together, his chest rising and falling in rapid time and lips shuddering as though he might say something. His cheeks are flushed, and when his eyes meet Guts’ he clenches his fists and looks away.

The aura of white light surrounding him gleams, and then he is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slan is my "horny on main" queen and you can rip her from my cold, dead hands. let me know ur Thots about this chapter in the comments lads....


	9. tristesse & tabes.

I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish  
Than if 'twere Truth. It has been often so:  
Must I die under it? Is no one near?  
Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?

\- "Fragment 2," Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Midland’s castle is dark and quiet. Griffith’s fingers still shake as he walks through the main hall, up the stairs. With most of the aristocrats killed off or kidnapped by the invading Kushans, the king dead, and the queen long passed after what Griffith did to her, Griffith is the last remnant of real power from before Midland began its rapid descent into disorder. He feels far from powerful now, though.

Though he wouldn’t have thought it possible - not in this empty shell of a body, a facsimile of his human self - he feels nausea twist and curl in his chest. The gleam in Slan’s eyes as she pressed her lips to Guts’, his sword shot through her stomach, shines brightly in Griffith’s mind as his pace quickens. He has to curl his hands into fists to disguise how hard they tremble.

“The princess is settled,” a gravelly voice grates out beside him. Griffith halts, then turns, and sees Zodd, now reverted back to his less-monstrous human form, leaning against a pillar of stone. Griffith nods his approval. Zodd continues, “I felt a shift in the air. What happened?”

“Slan crossed over, just for a moment. She’s gone now. Her business was merely  _ personal _ .”

“Personal business which involves you?” Zodd’s eyebrow raised, “Did it, perhaps, also involve that boy?”

“What would make you think that?”

“You seem highly invested in his well-being as of late. I would assume if she decided to manifest on this plane, and her manifesting should involve him, you may have gone to assure his safety. As you did when I fought him outside the blacksmith’s home.”

Griffith grits his teeth, “Don’t push.”

Zodd flinches upright at the order, the invisible threads of control Griffith’s words hold over all of the apostles cinching Zodd back in. “As you wish,” Zodd replies.

Griffith climbs the stairs up toward his quarters, chest heaving as he seethes. Zodd, while being Griffith’s most obedient and steadfast soldier, holds the unique distinction of having known Griffith when he was human. Even then, he’d had Zodd’s respect as being one of the few who was able to wound him in his centuries of wandering battlefields, an odd violent affection which Zodd felt toward Guts, too. Griffith can remember having felt the same when Guts had first slammed his fist into Griffith’s cheek that day they’d fought on the grassy hill overlooking the Hawk’s camp. Griffith had fought to own Guts, to have Guts be his soldier. It had been the first time in his life Griffith had not been completely sure he would win. That sense of exhilaration, of feverish movement and the rush when he took Guts’ face into his hands, his thumb brushing aside the blood dribbling from Guts’ split lip, and whispered ‘now you’re mine’ was still not forgotten even to Griffith’s deadened, unfeeling new self.

Ah, but Guts never was truly his, was he? He had won Guts, had felt as though he owned him for some time, but Guts left him. Even after all this time, Griffith feels a bitter taste flood his jaw at the thought.

He shuts the door to his room behind him and sheds his armour, left only in his black underclothes. The room is dark, the fireplace unlit, and through the curtains wavering in the soft night breeze the stars glitter in the sky. Griffith presses his palm up against the window pane, the warmth of his shuddering breath painting the glass with grey fog. The tranquillity of the scene contrasts the slurry of thoughts half-formed in his mind.

Was Slan’s meeting with Guts really even about Guts? Or was it merely to attract Griffith? And to what end? What did she say to Guts before Griffith arrived?

That sick feeling returns to his stomach. Watching her hands rove over Guts’ chest, her lips kiss him while Griffith was trapped there, forced to keep his restrained composure - it had to have been by her design. Her exact words to Guts had even been ‘ _ didn’t I tell you he’d be upset? _ ’

That gives Griffith pause. He  _ is _ upset. Why, exactly, eludes him.

The idea of her - or anyone, really - touching Guts like that makes his teeth grind and his body tense with boiling rage. And when that rage is smothered and burnt out, he’s left with only the disturbingly familiar emptiness and ache that has carried over from when he was human.

He finally has what he’s always wanted: the castle, the princess, all symbols of power that only he can imbibe with more meaning. Yet he feels within him a deep, yawning hollowness, that gapes and cedes and grows like an infected wound, sticking to his insides. It’s not the emptiness he felt when he made the sacrifice and tore his emotions out of his own chest during the Eclipse, but conversely, the feeling of an excess rather than a loss.

Zodd’s words in the hallway come back to his mind, that Griffith had gone to Guts ‘ _ to assure his safety. _ ’ Although he hadn’t known Guts would even be there, Griffith can’t delude himself into thinking helping Guts wasn’t what he’d done. When he’d told Guts to run his sword through Slan, it had been mostly because, in his anger, Griffith wanted to see her suffer. But there was also the nagging, underlying admission that perhaps, perhaps he’d also wanted to help Guts escape. The sight of the blood and the deep gash in Guts’ chest had made Griffith’s heartbeat harsh against his rib cage, just as it had when Zodd had advanced on him at the hill of swords.

He’d been scared, he realizes. He didn’t want Guts to die.

Griffith slogs across the room, collapsing on his bed and curling his knees into his chest. As though possessed, his hands blindly reach up to dig his blunt fingernails into his scalp, pulling at the loose white curls haloing his forehead, but not even the pain can stop the thoughts flooding his head.

Something is wrong with him. He shouldn’t still feel this way. He had sacrificed everyone, ripped his heart in two during the Eclipse to escape this feeling, this fretting ache in his chest, the consuming loneliness, yet here it was again. The question burns in his throat:  _ why do I still want to protect him? _

When he gave up his human heart, he truly did stop caring about everything, becoming a slave to his old self’s dream, and even that he didn’t feel any emotion toward. He could feign something approximating happiness, joy, or passion, but behind that mask was just a vacant, soulless him. That all seemed to change when Guts was added to the equation. Guts dug into that dark, gnawing pit in his chest and ripped out all the worst things Griffith felt when he was human - the isolation, the longing, the anxiety.

How fitting, that after the betrayal, the year of torture, the utter helplessness, that he should now be victim to the same weakness that ruined him when he was human. What was the point of it all? If he couldn’t even numb his own emotions, why did he sacrifice anyone, or become part of the God Hand, or rebirth himself so that he could actualize a dream that he hardly even wants anymore? The flow of fate is too defined to put it up to random cruel chance, he knew that, yet it all felt so pointless. If he had known this is how it would end, he would have wished to die instead.

Griffith shoves his hand underneath his pillows, pulling out the ratty black cloak Guts had tucked over his shoulders when he was reborn at the Tower of Conviction. He had still kept it after all this time. He felt almost unable to get rid of it, in fact. It was a tangible reminder of the fact that Guts had still cared about him enough to help him, give up his cloak to shield Griffith from the cold, if only for a moment.

Although what drew him toward that cave in the woods was the force of Slan’s presence, when he was there he had felt another yanking tug in the back of his mind: a behelit. Guts must have come into contact with one during his fights with the apostles. The pull of the behelit was intense in its strength, and Griffith knew its opening must be approaching.

Maybe, if Guts used the behelit and became an apostle, he could join Griffith’s new Band of the Hawk. They could fight together like they used to, and this time, Guts would stay at Griffith’s side until he secured the throne and then afterwards, too, just like Griffith had wanted. Things could go back to the way they used to be.

But Griffith couldn’t imagine Guts as an apostle. All of his memories of Guts are imbued with a softness around the edges - he’d seen, in few spare moments, Guts’ bloodthirsty side, but it was never his defining feature in Griffith’s mind. To see Guts reduced down to the base savage instincts of the apostles would be jarring.

If the behelit was close to opening, that meant Guts was falling deeper and deeper into despair, and that soon, he’d reach his breaking point. It’s Griffith’s fault. Like Guts had said when Griffith went to meet him at the hill of swords, because of what Griffith has done, Guts is cursed to be haunted by demons and ghosts until his death. Although Griffith wants to tell himself it’s what Guts deserves, his retribution for abandoning Griffith and ruining his life, the feelings of hate are now only eclipsed by guilt.

He casts Guts’ cloak aside and pulls the blankets over himself. It’s hard to sleep in this body since sleep isn’t something he needs anymore, but Griffith wishes he could escape into unconsciousness for a few hours.

With a sigh, he closes his eyes. Far away, he can feel the faint pulse of Guts’ behelit moving nearer to the castle.

* * *

The patch of space where Griffith’s now-absent form once stood appears to spark and glow with fading traces of light. Guts tastes metal on his tongue, and his head still spins from the dizzying, oppressive heat and blood loss.

As though he has only just processed what just happened, he scrubs his mouth with the back of his hand, wanting to somehow rid himself of the abhorrent feeling of Slan’s lips on his. At his feet, what remains of her scrapped-together body lies trampled and broken. The sump of coiled intestines pools with blood, which drips from every wet ceiling and wall around him.

Again, Griffith has come and gone, and again, Guts was useless to do anything. Up until the moment where Griffith actually comes into the picture, Guts is sure and still in his resolve, can manage to convince himself to hate Griffith, but then inevitably Griffith will appear and leave him more confused than ever. Griffith had helped him. And knowing Griffith was watching had been the only thing that even gave Guts the strength to lift his sword and drive it into Slan.

He drags himself up onto his feet, stumbling back out of the cave into the cold bath of moonlight shining through the trees. That oppressive fog had dissipated, yet the feeling of rot and desertion still lingered over the underbrush.

“Slan. I sensed she drew near,” Skull Knight’s disjointed voice suddenly rang out, and through the trees, Guts could see him atop his horse, staring off into the distance. “He was there, too. Wasn’t he?”

Guts doesn’t answer, but Skull Knight nods all the same. His glowing gaze falls on the gash in Guts’ chest, “They attacked you.”

“Just her,” Guts bites out, clenching his eyes shut as the world begins to spin in his peripherals.

“And him?”

“He…” Guts swallows, “He showed up randomly. Told me to stab her, so I did.” 

Skull Knight is quiet for a moment as if pondering. “A God Hand member soliciting violence against another. That is unprecedented.”

Guts’ knees buckle, and he has to reach out to a stray boulder to steady himself. At this rate, there’s not much time left before he passes out. Fumbling, he gropes around in his bag for the strips of bandage and vial of alcohol he keeps as a disinfectant, and clumsily begins dealing with the wound. The Skull Knight looks on until he finishes, then says, “You should retire to Flora’s home until you’ve healed enough to carry on. With that behelit as a beacon bolstering your location, there is nowhere else in the world as safe for you as this, under the witch’s protection spell.”

With nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, Guts silently begins the trek back to the shack on his own. The Skull Knight has veered off elsewhere, likely gone to patrol the area - Guts doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to hear anything about the God Hand or causality or his fate anymore. Once he has made it back inside the old shack, he finds the body mysteriously gone. Perhaps the Skull Knight prepared a burial for her, held vigil over her body as a friend. Guts cannot help but wonder if anyone will do the same for him when he dies. 

He all but collapses on the wicker settee in the living room, a quaint little place covered in vases of flowers and hanging glass mobiles. It feels wrong to sleep in a dead woman’s house, mere feet away from where her neck snapped and she drew her final breaths, but Guts has done fucked up shit like this before, so does it really matter? Who’s he to suddenly start worrying about the morality of where he decides to pass out?

By all reasoning, sleep should come easily to him, yet he finds himself tossing and turning. Maybe its the throbbing pain of the cut over his chest or seeing Griffith again that keeps him up. How long had it been since their meeting in the snow? A day? Guts can’t judge the way time flows anymore, since it seems to go around him rather than through. Like so many other aspects that punctuate human life, he’s been exempted from even the basics of being able to count the days, weeks, years. Since the Eclipse he’s been too preoccupied with merely staying alive and chasing down Griffith to think of anything else. 

Eventually, he falls into a restless slumber, and he dreams of that shadowy dog whispering to him through the darkness and the anger in Griffith’s eyes in that cave.

When he wakes, the sun is only just rising. He can hear the Skull Knight in the adjoining room, pacing over the carpeted floor. 

“What’s goin’ on?” Guts asks, blinking hard against the invading morning light streaming through the multitudes of windows cluttering the walls. The Skull Knight stops, turning to look pointedly at a bench in the darkest corner, where the blinding light seems to shy away. On the bench there is a slouched suit of armour, stooping toward the earth.

“This is the Berserker Armour. I wore it, once, but I was forced to entrust it to Flora after the darkness possessing it became too more for even me to bear,” he gestures to the skeletal bevor, shaped in striking similarity to his own fleshless jaw.

“And what’s so special about it?”

“It is enchanted. The armour feeds on the worst of one’s emotions - fear, rage, hatred - and devours them, making the wearer little more than an unfeeling machine built for battle. Even one’s awareness of their own physicality and pain becomes dulled once the armour latches on. In many ways, it functions as a parasite: it consumes and consumes its owner until, eventually, it kills its host.”

Guts knows those words should register as a warning, but he finds himself stepping towards the slouched metal with interest. “It makes you stronger?”

“Yes, for a time. It can even meld broken bones back together. But all at a grave cost. Once one becomes addicted to the effects the armour produces in battle, they may drive themselves towards death just to continue reaping the benefits.” The Skull Knight’s voice is as detached as ever. “I was in danger of that fate, so I passed it onto the one person I knew could safeguard it from those hungry for its power. But she is gone.”

“I’ll take it,” Guts blurts out.

“You? You know you are exactly the type this armour feeds best on. Do you not fear what will become of you?”

“No,” there’s an edge to his tone now, “No, I don’t care what happens to me. I just need to be strong enough to fight Griffith.”

“Take heed. You will not last long with it in your possession.”

“Don’t have to last long, just long  _ enough _ ,” he growls. His fist clenches at his side even as he can feel his pulse pushing blood through the bandages over his chest wound. “I just have to live long enough to kill Griffith. There’s nothing left for me after he’s gone.”

“If that’s the life you desire, then so be it. I do not aim to lead you off the path you have chosen. Fate will go as it may.” The Skull Knight steps forward and creaks open the facial hull, separating the sallet from the bevor. “It’s yours.”

Finally, finally a leg up. Guts knew he couldn’t do it as he is - Griffith is the closest thing existing to a god, as far as Guts knows - and finally he has some form of help in the shape of this armour. Even if it slowly kills him, that’s an equal price to pay to kill Griffith. A life for a life.

The Skull Knight leaves the room, the vacancy and ensuing silence pushing Guts closer to the armour. Though the chassis lies empty, there’s a sense that something lurks inside, waiting. He puts it on.

By the time everything is secured up to the chest plate, Guts can already feel a buzzing down to his marrow. The eching agony from where Slan’s claws slashed him ebbs, the stab in his side from his fall off the Tower of Conviction fades. He feels whole like he never has before.

The helmet stays off. He doesn’t want to know what will happen to him when the armour is fully activated, not yet.

When he steps out of Flora’s house and into the woods, the Skull Knight is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, as per usual, he only came to deliver cryptic advice and flimsy warnings, then vanish without a word. 

Griffith helping him defeat Slan changed nothing. The score was still the same between them, and Guts would still do whatever it took to rip away Griffith’s attention for himself. He is still going to kill Griffith. Nothing has changed, even if Guts does feel a tiny glimmer of hope in his chest knowing that twice now this new Griffith has saved him, and that surely it must mean something.

The path out of the forest has become clear in the burgeoning daylight. Guts slings his sword back into its holster over his shoulder and sets off toward Midland’s castle town. 

* * *

Sunlight reflects off of the golden scales of the fish idly wading through the pond, mouthing at the murmurous flies that dip across the surface and the wispy moss that sways softly through the current. Despite the nippy winter air, swathes of flowers still stand strong bordering the edges of the manicured garden, their pinks and violets and verdurous hues up-lifting to face the cold morning sky. Griffith watches the shadow of a single thrush flit between the branches of barren trees, its tiny chest heaving as it pushes out a song.

“Did you sleep well?” Charlotte’s voice pulls him from his reverie, and he draws his gaze back down to the cooling cup of tea in front of him. She often likes to have breakfast out in the garden, away from the eyes and ears of the few nobles still residing in the castle, all of whom love yet loathe Griffith. How fiercely she defends his honour against them. He wonders if she would still do the same if she knew what he had done to get here.

“Yes, quite fine, and yourself?” Griffith takes a sip of his tea. He has no need to eat any longer, but he must in order to keep up the facade of being human. All food is insipid to him now, his sense of taste dulled in his new body. It’s as though all old human forms of pleasure, even eating, he is blocked off from.

“I had a strange dream,” she says, her eyes meeting his, “of a hawk being torn apart by a wolf. And when I walked nearer to it all that was left was its white feathers, splashed with blood, and its half-eaten heart, still beating.”

Griffith is silent for a moment, then slowly replies, “Very strange, indeed. But dreams are nothing more than dreams.”

“Yes, you’re right. Still, when I awoke I felt a deep sadness, and my throat clenched up like I might cry. Isn’t it so silly to cry over a dream?”

“Not at all. You’re probably just having a shock. With your father dying, and the kingdom being raided by the Kushan armies, and then my return, you’ve been through a lot these past months.”

She sighed, then smiled up at him, “Again, you’re right. I’m so glad you’re back. Without you, I think I barely even know myself.”

Griffith’s smile falters, becoming an almost grotesquely lopsided thing, “Perhaps.”

He lifts his fork to take a bite of the brioche the servants brought out earlier, but it sticks in his throat and feels like chalk going down. The sound of footsteps carries across the lawn, and then a guard is beside him, leaning in to say in hushed tones: “Sir Griffith, there is a visitor requesting to see you in the main hall.”

Griffith’s chest swells, his annoyingly still too-hopeful and too-human mind racing to a conclusion as to who it might be, but he quickly quells the feeling. He stands, bowing to Charlotte before returning back inside to greet this guest. Probably just an old soldier or a noble wishing to see the truth for themselves, see if he really was alive as the gossip says. 

His eyes widen just a fraction as he enters the main hall. “Rickert.”

The young boy glares at him with steely eyes, his fists balled as Griffith steps nearer. “So,” Griffith says, stopping a few feet away, “have you come with an answer to the question I asked when we last met, outside the blacksmith’s home? Do you wish to join me again, and serve in the new Band of the Hawk?”

Griffith knows what will happen before it does, yet he does not move to block the blow or save himself. Instead, he stands mutely as Rickert slaps him across the face. There’s something righteous in the way it stings and leaves the skin of his cheek hot. Griffith knows he deserves it. He stares down at Rickert blankly.

“Guts told me what happened. I was ashamed. I couldn’t go with them the day they rescued you, and during the Eclipse, I could only sit outside and watch. Guts wouldn’t let me come with him when he left after you visited -  he said I would die if I did. I think he knows he’s probably gonna die, too,” Rickert’s eyes begin to water, but his voice doesn’t waver,.

“I see,” is all Griffith says.

“I’m not like him. I wasn’t there for the Eclipse, and it’s not my fight, so I can’t feel that hatred he does.”

_ Hatred. _ Griffith nearly flinches at the word, even though he shouldn’t be surprised. It makes sense for Guts to hate him. He deserves that, too.

“But I’m Rickert, of the Band of the Hawk. I’m led by Griffith. This Hawk of Light, he’s not my commander. He’s not the Griffith I knew. I won’t join him.”

“I see,” Griffith repeats. He doesn’t know what else to say.

Rickert turns, glancing back over his shoulder as Griffith watches him, “Goodbye.” 

“Farewell,” Griffith responds softly. Rickert’s eyebrows furrow but he still walks away, disappearing down the stairway and out into the bustle of the broken castle town. He takes the hand of a small girl - Erica, he heard Guts call her on that snowy hill - and the two of them duck into an alleyway out of Griffith’s sight.

Griffith’s cheek still burns, but the pain is grounding. His sternum sinks deep into his stomach, almost like he’s choking on the very air itself, and his jaw works silently. 

It seems he’s been rejected. 

As he walks back through the empty castle and out into the garden, that bitter taste he felt in his mouth the night before returns. The thrush he earlier saw flitting from tree to tree has gone, and aside from the steady trickle of water into the pond, the garden is oddly quiet. Charlotte beams at him when he sits back down. Not even the lukewarm tea washes that bitter taste away.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know it took me like forever to post this lol sorry my lifes just a mess. lemme know what u think in the comments, i rly enjoy reading them!


	10. i'll stay alive for you.

Ah, love, let us be true  
To one another! for the world, which seems  
To lie before us like a land of dreams,  
So various, so beautiful, so new,  
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,  
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;  
And we are here as on a darkling plain  
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,  
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

\- "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold

 

“Guess he was right,” Guts mumbles, looking down at the behelit clenched in his hand, “this thing really does attract ‘em.”

He shakes the sticky viscera from his arm, watching the rivulets of blood flick into the grass below. The bodies of apostles, torn to ribbons and already beginning to fester, flies trickling in from the damp banks of the nearby river murmuring across what limbs and organs still remain intact, gather around Guts. His chest heaves fog out into the cold dawn air while he pants like some wild beast.

Since the brief respite of Flora’s cottage, Guts hasn’t slept once, yet the familiar weight of exhaustion doesn’t slow him. Aches and pains he’s grown used to seem to have been leached right out of his body through the armour. As for the lack of rest, well, sleeplessness is something he’s well acquainted with. He could muddle through like he always does.

The Skull Knight’s warning still rings dully in Guts’ ears: _it consumes and consumes its owner until, eventually, it kills its host._ Even just wearing it like this, without the helm to complete the set, he can feel numbness smoothing over his body, filling in the cracks that were once before infected with the oppressing sensation of discomfort. The agony that had defined his life for the past years and gave him the edge to press onward was slowly disappearing, and it felt, to him, like a part of him was vanishing with it.

Perhaps the more disturbing side effect, however, was the visions.

In the beginning, they were harmless. Fleeting shadows in the corners of his vision, phantom voices whispering from nowhere, crawling on his skin. But those are harmless compared to the dog. The dog trails behind him wherever he goes, sits patiently beside him while he eats and rests and thinks, silent, except for the quietest of moments when Guts feels most completely alone. Now, it snuffs its muzzle into the cracked rib cage of an apostle, laps with its pink tongue at the soft insides. It lifts its head and looks into Guts’ eyes, licking the blood from its lips, _You feel stronger with this new armour, don’t you? All of these apostles at once - do you think you could have done this before?_

“That’s the whole point of wearing it.”

_Yes. It strengthens us both._

Guts ignores it, slogging down the riverbank toward the water's edge. He can’t stand the smell of blood on him, sticking between his fingers and in the lines of his palm. That, too, brings to mind the sound of them all - Casca, Pippin, Judeau, Gaston, all of them - desperately screaming to know what was happening, the sound of bones crunching under the force of teeth, the far-off cackles and smiles of the watching God Hand. His hands shake.

_You can ignore me all you like, but it changes nothing. I am you. I exist because you allow me to. And you can never cut me out of you because to kill me is to kill you._

He pares the armour off feverishly, nearly ripping the leather straps of the gauntlet in his rush to cast them away. The encasing of metal has become less like a safe chassis and more like something closing in on him, trapping him inside. In the rush he stumbles backwards, splashing calf-deep into the river water. A seething gasp slips through his teeth at the cold. Like it had that day in the mountains when he met the new Griffith, the wind blew snowflakes down from the clouds and frost settled over the wet rocks.

The dog stalks closer, testing the water with a clawed paw. Guts knows it’s all in his head, he knows, and still, the voice seems louder when it says, _Seeing blood on your hands scares you, yet when you run your sword through them, you feel satisfied. Why do you regret? Do you think they felt fear when the blood of the Hawks was flowing onto their hands?_

“Shut up.”

_Tell me or yourself whatever you’d like. You already know how to make it stop._

Guts scowls, working off the chest plate. No matter what the dog said about it being inevitable, Guts refuses to give in. Spirit, demon, a manifestation of his innermost thoughts, Guts doesn’t care - he won’t let these visions control him.

_Why not let me take control? Would you rather claw and struggle against your own emotions, or let yourself be consumed by them and become stronger for it? All the confusion, the hurt, the betrayal… let it be overrun by hatred. Then you won’t have to feel anything anymore._

He’s thought about it, certainly. Like the armour, this shape-shifting apparition promises it can give him strength, the power he needs to get to Griffith, although it asks a much different price. Guts is willing to let the armour eat away at him from the inside out, as he won’t have a use for this body much longer. He would like to keep his right mind, though. He’s tired of being dragged around by the God Hand, causality, and other forces outside of his control; he doesn’t need a dog calling the shots in his mind to round it all out.

_What purpose does someone like you have for control? He took that away from you when he scored that brand into your neck. You said it yourself: all that’s left for you now is watching the life fade from his eyes as you kill him._

“Shut up!” He screams, dashing the last piece of the armour against the water. The moment it leaves his body a seizing agony flashes down his spine, rivering through each limb. Every injury he’d since forgotten about - the slash across his chest from Slan, the dozens of bruises from Zodd, the deep stab wound in his side from the rebar that struck him during his fall from the Tower of Conviction - all come back with renewed anger. He bites into his bottom lip.

His thin undershirt sticks to his ribs as he peels it away. The difference is small, yet noticeable enough to make Guts double check, and when he looks down, he can see the bone radiating off from his sternum peeking out below the skin. Around his clavicle, too, the flesh is sunken and hollow, like the ridged spine of a starving stray. Now that it’s brought to mind, he can’t remember the last time he’s eaten, either. Did the armour suppress hunger, or was he beginning to waste away, like the Skull Knight promised he would under its influence?

Shock to the system though it may be, the icy water helps Guts feel awake and alive. Sometimes, when the routine of walking or fighting begins to feel rhythmic, Guts loses himself in the motions. It doesn’t feel safe and natural like it used to when he was young and had no place to go but onto the battlefield of whatever lord or knight would pay him, it feels deadening.

Lately, Guts finds himself thinking about what a monster even is. The apostles whose bodies he piles up in his wake are monsters because they kill because they have ties to the inhuman, but isn’t he the same? All monsters were human once, too, like the dead spirits who stalk him at night, or the apostles, or the God Hand. The line between what’s evil and what’s not seems to blur with each passing day, to the point where now, the question of morality is just him versus whatever gets in his way. At the Tower of Conviction, Guts had watched unbothered as hundreds of people were squashed under the heel of Mozgus and the phantoms, and he didn’t even have it in him to care, what with how focused he was on Griffith. Humans, monsters - Guts cuts through everything in his path to get to him.  

Maybe he could still leave this all behind to try and become someone else, start a new life. A moot life with no destination, no purpose, nothing to fight for, wandering from battlefield to battlefield to earn his keep like he did when he was a child, feeling only the fear and exhilaration of battle, and numbness without, then to die pointlessly and still have his soul dragged down to hell with his last laborious breath.

No, he's damned no matter what way he spins it. Damned and alone in a world where the only person who knows him has turned his back to him, isolated save for the lecherous haunt of spirits. There's nowhere he belongs, or ever could belong, stuck in the boundary between the astral and the physical.

Once he’s rubbed himself raw and the water has left him shaking, Guts stands up and starts pulling his clothes back on. He rushes to fit the armour over his shoulders, wrists, legs, wanting to numb the pain that had grown stronger in its absence and the hoary bite at his skin.

_Not much longer now. These apostles haven’t gathered here for nothing. The castle town’s border is only a few hours away. Feel how close we are to him._

Guts doesn’t listen. He knows he needs to stop, rest, and eat, the bones jutting out on his chest were enough of a reminder even if the armour kept his stomach from growling. Hands shaking, he reaches into his bag and feels for the loaf of bread he’d stolen last time he ate.

The pathetic morsel of food has gone hard, and mould encroaches on all sides, sickly green and fuzzy. Guts gags at the putrid smell, clumsily slicing away the green with the edge of one of his throwing knives and rips off a piece of the tasteless bread with his teeth.

 _This is your life. It’s always been this way. Did you think you ever deserved anything more than this?_ The dog curls its tail under itself as it sits beside Guts, its eyes reflecting the red light of the setting sun behind them. Under Guts’ molars, the bread works itself into a paste, the metallic taste of the mould sticking to his tongue and the dry crust scraping his throat on the way down. He scowls.

* * *

Griffith watches despondently as the waitstaff sweep away the myriad of platters and trays adorning the table - hot bread and whipped butter, pork pot pie, sugared almonds, malardis swimming in drippings, thickened pottage - and bring piles of desserts in their place. They were celebrating Griffith’s victory at driving the Kushan armies out of the castle town and beyond the borders of Midland, yet Griffith had been silent the whole dinner, scraping at the food on his plate without tasting any of it.

Wine flows back into his emptied glass from the linen-wrapped bottle Charlotte holds, and Griffith can feel her eyes roaming over his face, trying to give him a smile. He brings the glass up to take a sip, though he knows its a useless action - the wine won’t do anything to him. This body, despite being endowed with all the normal functions and trappings of his old one, feels no hunger, or thirst, and gets no pleasure from the fulfilment of either. Being no longer human as he is, he’s more accurately possessing a lifeless corpse than he is actually living in it.

The nobles drone on about the security of their titles now that the country is no longer in upheaval, with Charlotte occasionally offering polite smiles and pleasant nods. Through the dull buzz of noise, Griffith slips back into his thoughts. Sitting in a room full of people, influencing the conversation by his presence yet saying nothing, reminds Griffith of that interlude of time after the Eclipse and before he was reborn. He didn’t exist physically on this plane, but still observed and listened from beyond, watching the converging and diverging lines of causality oscillate gently. Even now, if he tugs at the loose threads in the corners of the perception of his human body, he can see them: the strings that tie him, Charlotte, and everyone else in the room to the path of fate the God Hand has manipulated, bracketed by the fuzzy dark gaps in the story that has yet to be decided.

He can also feel the behelit Guts holds moving ever closer to the castle.

In the days since Griffith met Guts and Slan in her domain of Qliphoth, the behelit has been an ever-affixed mark in the back of Griffith’s mind. It draws nearer with every moment, not stopping night or day. At first, Griffith had tried to ignore it, but now he is tuned into it always, a faint fluttering in his ribcage whenever it picks up speed or slows.

His eyes fall down to his plate, which Charlotte had covered in tarte and strawberries, then away and out the window. The behelit is nearing the far reaches of the city, the border where the more violent apostles dwell outside the limit of human occupation. When Guts gets there, will he be able to cut his way through them? A human marked for sacrifice will pose as an even more tantalizing plaything for the apostles, and while Guts is strong, is he strong enough to fend off dozens of them? Griffith has paid close attention to the movements of the behelit, so he knows Guts has not stopped to sleep in all this time. Unrested and strung out as he must be, he stands little chance of surviving.

But maybe he will. Maybe he’ll burn the city, rip down everything in his way, then storm the castle, kill Zodd, burst into the dining room, slaughter both sides of the table, until it's only the two of them left and they’re stood there, staring at each other with trepidation, and then -

“Griffith? Are you alright? You haven’t eaten a thing.”

He sits up a little straighter, blinking hard. Charlotte’s eyes are glassy with worry. “Yes,” he breathes, “yes, I’m fine. Just not feeling well. It will pass.”

The rest of the table hushes. “Perhaps,” Charlotte says gently, “you should go lie down and relax. I don’t want you to fall sick.”

On any other day, Griffith would have insisted otherwise, not wanting to let his infallible facade slide, but he couldn’t find it in him to pander to the nobles tonight. Besides, acquiescing to Charlotte’s advice would make her happy. He nods, rises from his chair, bows, and then slips out into the hallway.  

The light streaming in from the windows lands in uniform rays on the carpet in lines perfectly straight and parallel, though the sickening blood red colour skews the symmetrical order of it into something sinister. All the way through the west wing and up the stairs the cold corridors are impartially quiet. Mazes of cobwebs snuck away in the stone corners, however, betray the decay and rot hidden beneath that false regal disguise.

This had been his dream once. Walking through these halls, having this moot symbol of power and being given reign over it. Now it seems to fade right out of his hands, bleeding into that maze of the interconnecting threads of causation.

When he stops his steady footfall, he finds himself up in the castle’s keep. The wind blows his hair into his face from behind, a flurry of snowflakes coming down with it, and above the clouds, Griffith can see the stars beginning to peek through. Again, he feels the behelit grow closer.

Out past the border of the castle town, away from the hordes of mankind, the apostles Griffith has silently deemed unfit for civil life begin to stir. Griffith knows they must sense someone branded with the mark of sacrifice. He can almost taste their pent-up aggression and hunger from here.

If Guts charges in blindly (and he always does - Griffith can even remember shaping his battle plans around that unpredictable facet of him) he will certainly die. No human can stand up to dozens of apostles at a time.

He shouldn’t interfere. Helping Guts with Slan had been enough, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He shouldn’t care if Guts lived or died. It was inevitable he’d be killed someday, regardless of whether Griffith postponed it or not.

Over the jagged rock of the castle keep, Griffith can see a figure, so distant it appears only as a mass of black with no shape, withdraw from the cover of the forest and step out into the open field. There’s a flurry of movement, then the darkness of the encroaching night blankets the landscape as the last of twilight fades.

Just like he had when he felt Slan’s presence press into this plane, Griffith moves without hesitation or thought, disappearing and appearing again, alone, on the precipice of steep stone serving as the divide between the dwellings of the humans and apostles. He goes unnoticed.

Below, apostles have encircled that selfsame black figure Griffith had seen break through the tree barrier. Guts grips his sword, chest heaving, staring down at the corpse at his feet. A set of black-rubbed armour covers him from neck to toe, the helmet strapped to his sword’s sheath, swaying with the minute movements he makes as he eyes the crowd that has formed around him, his face set and stern. His cheeks look gaunt, though, and when Guts turns to look behind him, Griffith can see the knobs of his spine through the back of his neck.

“A sacrifice…” one of the apostles murmurs, and the word echoes through the mouths of the others who gather. “It’s Lord Griffith’s sacrifice…”

Guts visibly blanches at that, and Griffith can see his jaw clench. “I’m here to see him. Now get the hell out of my way, I don’t have time for all of you.”

The apostles respond with heavy silence. The circle grows tighter.

“Outnumbered again, huh?” Guts remarks. “Maybe I should try this thing out for real,” he slaps the chest plate of the armour. In the way Guts’ hand feels behind him, then draws back, Griffith can see hesitation.

Guts swings the length of the sword in an arc around him, and the blade cuts through each torso of the apostles nearest, who fall to the ground with screams. Human eyes could hardly register the speed of the motion as Guts charges through the crowd, slashing every way. It’s like the frantic movements of a cornered animal in its savage desperation, like he cannot feel pain or fear.

In all their years of battle together, Griffith has never seen Guts like this. Looking down at him now, it was nearly impossible to differentiate him from the monsters he tore through with his sword. Griffith watches, entranced.

When Guts finally stops the snow covering the field is dyed bright red. Any apostles smart and fast enough to do so have escaped, and the slow - or stupid - all lie in various states of disembowelment across the snow. Moonlight bathes Guts’ armour in a white glow.

Under the lip of the wall Griffith watches from, something moves through the shadows. Guts spots it just as fast, his head jerking to the side. Fingers curled around the hilt of his sword tight, Guts puts his weight back on his knees, preparing to spring.

“I heard a commotion. It looks like I missed out.”

Griffith recognizes the voice, and its identity becomes clear when the shadowy figure steps into the light. The black mass of fabric and bone-white mask starkly contrast the sea of blood left behind. How Raksas, one of Griffith’s commanders, managed to hear the fight going on outside the city walls was a mystery, but his presence didn’t bode well for Guts.

Guts surges forward with sword in hand, yet his jabs are easily evaded. “Ah,” Raksas remarks, “I remember you from the Eclipse. Have you come to see Griffith?”

At the mention of Griffith’s name, Guts snarls again, heaving the sword up and narrowly missing Raksas’ stomach.

“I can’t let you kill the hawk,” Raksas says, bounding away and blending into the darkness of the forest while Guts rushes to follow, “Because someday, I will shoot him out of flight myself.”

“No,” Guts sneers, his voice coming out strained through the armour, “He’s **mine**.”

Griffith’s eyes widen. Deep in his chest, he can feel a shift, and the cold fist of his heart begins to knock against the inside of his ribs.

Raksas dips out of the forest, slithering on the ground past Guts and back into the shadow of the stone wall. A tendril of black slips out of the mass of fabric and lashes out at Guts, stabbing into the back of his knee. As though he doesn’t notice the pain at all, Guts advances, sword a blurry of glinting metal as he strikes at Raksas. He shoves the blade through the fabric of Raksas’ shroud, pinning the squirming apostle to the ground.

“I own his death,” Guts spits, “I decide where he dies.”

“If you survive,” the hooked claw topping one of Raksas’ spindly appendages careens forward, thrusting into the swathe of skin above Guts’ armour. Griffith can’t see what happens, but Guts stumbles with a groan, then grabs hold of Raksas’ shoulders and slams the apostles head back into the stone wall. The corners of Raksas’ mask begin to crack, and Guts slams his head into the wall again, and again until a split emerges down the centre, and the porcelain falls away in splinters.

From under the cloak, Raksas brings his hands up to his face, roving over its nakedness. He looks up. When his eyes meet Griffith’s, he shrinks and pushes out of Guts’ reach, creeping away along the shadowy edge of the wall. Guts looks up, too, following the line of Raksas’ gaze, and against the backdrop of the blindingly white moon, Griffith’s silhouette is still as he stares back.

Watching in silence is one thing, but now, looking into Guts’ eyes, Griffith finds himself feeling apprehensive.

“Why are you here?” Guts demands, though his voice is quieter than when he spoke to Raksas just moments ago.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Griffith’s throat is tight. “You said you were here to see me?”

With the way Guts has to crane his head up to look at him, the sharp edge of the armour must dig into the nape of his neck. The image of how bony and frail it had seemed reclaims its spot inside Griffith’s mind again. Guts looks like he’s wasting away.

“So you heard everything, then,” Guts sounds a mix of angry and taken aback. That intensity that had shone so bright when he’d fought the apostles is gone, replaced now by only a foreign weariness.

“I did.” Griffith has to hold back the shiver that threatens to ripple down his spine as he remembers Guts’ words. _He’s mine._

"Rickert came to visit me." Griffith can hear Guts teeth grind, sees his fingers flex on the hilt of his sword as he watches Griffith expectantly for elaboration. Griffith doesn't know what Guts wants him to say. "The young girl was with him, too."

"What'd you do to them?!"

"Nothing. Why would I do anything?"

"Because you’re…” Guts trails off, and his gaze drops away. “If you didn’t do something, then what the hell are you tellin' me for?"

Griffith doesn't know the answer to that himself. He just felt like he should say something. "I don't want you to worry if you return home and they aren't back yet."

Guts stares at him in utter confusion for a few seconds, his head tilting to the side the slightest bit, until he finally mutters, "I don't live there."

"Ah," Griffith replies. They both watch each other, unsure of what to do or say.

"I don't live anywhere." Guts continues. Even he doesn't seem to know why they're still talking.

"And I live in the castle. I suppose we both got what we asked for, didn't we?"

Guts scowls and glares, but does nothing.

"What will you do after you kill me?"

Guts blanches, "What?"

"You said you have no home to return to. So, what will you do after you've killed me? Where will you go?"

Guts pauses, thrown off by the question. He doesn't want to think about it. "What does it matter to you? You're not gonna be around to see it."

Griffith makes a soft humming noise, pensive, "I suppose not."

"I got nothin' after I get rid of you. I'll probably die in the process anyway, or a little while after. Don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not in the best shape."

"You could still live a full life if you wanted to. Why don't you? You would be much happier."

"Who cares what I want? I lost my ability to make choices long ago. Now my choices are to either fight off your armies of apostles, lock myself up in hiding until I waste away, or put myself out of my own misery. All paths lead to the inevitable: I go to hell, along with the rest of us you stuck this brand on."

"You still have the chance at living a happy life. You could put the past behind you and start over."

"And what? Forget all the shit I've seen? Pretend I don't know about the things that hide in the dark, waiting to kill me when I let my guard down?" Guts gestures around him, "I’m a walking beacon for demons wherever I go. There's no escaping this. You're the one who's supposed to know about fate or whatever now. You tell me how well running away will work out."

Griffith has to admit that Guts is right. It’s his fault things are this way. He locked Guts into a life of death and destruction, not going through with the sacrifice all the way to the end during the Eclipse.

"If you don't kill me, Guts, I'll never die. I’m not sure I even can."

"Everything can die. Even you. I just gotta figure out how."

Instead of answering, Griffith nods, so frustratingly passive it makes Guts want to claw his skin off until this monster dies and the real Griffith trapped inside is set free.

Griffith takes a last look over the field of bodies, then turns his gaze back to Guts. “The two of us, talking after a battle - this brings back memories. But I must go now.” The moon hangs high in the sky, yet no stars are visible through the dark clouds. It was like this when they met on Rickert’s Hill of Swords, wasn’t it?

“Back to the castle, right? Go. I’ll make sure you see me there soon.”

 “I’ll stay alive for you then, until that day comes,” Griffith turns, and disappears. In his absence, Guts drops to his knees in the bloodied snow.  



	11. kintsugi.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,  
And, nothing himself, beholds  
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

\- _The Snow Man_ , Wallace Stevens

 

_If you keep letting him get away, eventually you’ll lose him._

“Maybe I’m better off losing him,” Guts mumbles, still staring at the spot where moments ago, Griffith stood. The dog’s breath huffs down his neck.

_If you lose him, you lose yourself. What’s left of you, anyway. What are you without him?_

Guts thought he would feel angry now, in the wake of yet another failure. All he feels is strangely hollow. He wonders if that’s how Griffith feels, too.

“I still don’t even know if it’s really him. He looks the same, talks the same, but something’s missing.”

_Does it matter? If you kill Griffith, you end everything between you, and you get your revenge. If you kill a monster that just looks like Griffith, then there’s another notch in your belt of demon heads. What else is there for you to do?_

Reconciling the Griffith he knows and the cold creature who speaks to him with distance feels impossible. Even after all he’s done, Guts doesn’t know if he can find it in himself to hate Griffith, though he knows he should. The betrayal still stings, but lodged underneath it is a desire to know, with finality, whether Griffith is truly dead and gone. To know if Guts has merely been chasing shadows and dust this whole time.

“I’ll kill him. But I want to know what I’m killing first.”

_You’re only stalling the inevitable. Feel the anger rising up from your belly, swallow it down, let that fuel you. Don’t waste time thinking. Just do._

Guts blocks out the voice. Anger and hatred have gotten him this far, but they won’t get him any closer. If he wants to truly _know_ , he has to get close to Griffith again. Like the old days. When Griffith had spoken of their meeting dredging up old memories, perhaps there’d been a hint of nostalgia in his words. It was far fetched, and maybe stupid, but if this new Griffith had been willing to save him three times, maybe there was a part of him - however deeply buried - that still ached for the familiarity of the past. Or, perhaps, the monster living under Griffith’s skin was curious about him. Either way, Guts could use whatever draw he held for Griffith as a way to weasel back to Griffith’s side.

The only way Guts could show Griffith the pain he himself had felt during the Eclipse was to stab Griffith in the back in turn.

* * *

Griffith can’t seem to go back to the castle, now after seeing Guts again. His feet take him down a familiar path, toward the barracks where the Hawks were once lodged. How far away it all seems - trips to the inn, laughing over mulled wine and venison, watching the younger ones wrestle for coins and the older ones place bets on the winner - how dead and gone, like the faces that occupy the memories. He thinks, if he closes his eyes and listens, he might still hear the racket of them all arguing about who has to pay the tab carried on the wind.

The barracks are empty. Fitting, Griffith thinks. Ivy climbs up the sides of the chimney, winding round the rotting shingles, and the air seems to get a bit colder as he approaches.

Around the back, Griffith finds the hill where Guts left him all those years ago. It still bites, though numbed, to see the place where he’d been brought to his knees for the first time. Bitter loathing settles over him like a shroud, his mind brought back to the day when he’d kneeled in the snow, mouth agape, mind screaming at him to call Guts’ name but body utterly frozen, like the frost had settled into his bones and moored him to his spot.

Thinking of what could have changed is always a deadly game, but Griffith can’t stop himself. Perhaps if Casca had never woken him to stop Guts from leaving, and they’d just let him slip away into the dawn, it wouldn’t have stung so badly. He would have never have been able to lose Guts so acutely, watch him slip out of his hands, have it be his own fault. Guts could have just left quietly, leaving Griffith always wondering but never knowing if he could have stopped him.

If only Guts had confronted him alone, maybe then Griffith could have won him back. Were it not for the eyes of Corkus, Pippin, Judeau, Rickert, and Casca - all so faithful, so sure Griffith would stop Guts - maybe they could have talked to each other. But then, no, Griffith was too proud for that.

There is nothing good in the world for him. Everything is so hard to grab, and even harder to hold onto, always slipping away from him just when he needs it the most.

When he finally circles back to the castle, Zodd is waiting at the door for him. “Tell everyone to leave their posts,” Griffith orders, “the human guards, too. Take the night off.”

As he climbs the stairs and navigates the hallways back to his room, he finds himself thinking again, like he had at dinner, about Guts storming the castle. With his new promise to kill Griffith, and Griffith’s promise in turn to stay alive for him, it seemed increasingly likely to happen.

Griffith can’t imagine himself dying any way other than by Guts’ hand. When he was human, he used to fantasize about him and Guts bleeding out on a battlefield together, or shuddering in some grove, sick with infection but still clinging to life. A violent end seemed their only option, and Griffith always thought it better to die young with Guts than to waste away old and grey in a bed. Despite everything, that much hadn’t changed.

The lantern is still lit in his room, and behind the gauze veil of his bed curtains he sees Charlotte, curled up and sleeping, head cradled on his pillow. She must have waited up for him. Griffith isn’t sure how to explain where he was and what he was doing without lying through his teeth.

Outside, the flurry of snowflakes has stopped, but it only makes the landscape look even more desolate, more lonely. Griffith stares out and presses his hand to the window, like a caged animal dreaming of freedom.

* * *

It’s deathly quiet in the streets of Midland’s castle town. The ragged sounds of Guts’ breathing as he nears the castle seem to almost echo off the cobblestones, eager to absorb some noise and feel less alone in the early morning hours.

There’s no guards at the gate. There’s nothing. No lines of defence set up to protect the precious nobility, and Guts’ brand doesn’t even burn as he storms through the front garden, making sure to trample a few flowers in his path.

He cranes his head back to look up at the imposing structure, its eves lined with pointed metal and stone slats for cannons to rest behind. The lack of military resistance here is suspicious, but knowing Griffith, there must be dozens of apostles roaming within, set as ambushes for anyone stupid enough to enter. Someone stupid like Guts.

The rightmost tower is the only one with a window still lit. Guts squints, fighting against the darkness, and sees the outline of a shape, a hand pressed against the glass. Griffith stares down at him, the candlelight from the lantern set on the sill beside him casting his face with ghostly shadows. For a few silent moments, they simply look at each other, and then Griffith draws back into the black of the room, out of sight. The foggy outline of his handprint slowly fades.

Guts doesn’t even realize his fingernails are digging into his palms until he looks down, feeling warmth dribbling down his wrists. Snarling, he kicks open the front doors - not even locked or barred - but finds himself hesitating at the threshold. Once he steps inside, there’s no going back, he knows that. If he lets himself feel unsure, he’ll back out of his plan, and then his chance will be gone.

Only the creak of old floorboards signals Griffith’s arrival, at the top of the stairs. There’s a whole corridor between them, and then a flight of carpeted steps, but Griffith doesn’t get any closer. Guts’ shadow casts long over the foyer, illuminated by the moon at his back.

“Gotta say, the security here sucks,” Guts says, lacking humour.

Griffith’s head cocks to the side, like he’s surprised Guts even bothered to skirt around the issue with talk of guards. “By design. I asked them to back off, in case you came.”

“You were expecting me.”

“Have you decided it’s my time to die already? I suppose I’ve forgotten your tenacity.”

“No,” Guts swallows, the words scraping against his dry throat, “I want to be… rehired.”

Griffith's face tilts downward, and he looks up at Guts from under his lashes calculatingly, eyes skating over Guts’ cheek, up to his eyebrow, down to his lips, his gaze never quite meeting Guts’. “Rehired.”

Guts nods. “Yeah.”

“What? As the Raider Captain?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Feeling nostalgic, Guts?”

“Are you?”

Griffith pauses, seeming to genuinely contemplate his answer. “Everything I do now comes easily, without the trappings of my old humanity. I miss the struggle of the past. I think of you, often, wonder if your struggling makes you feel more meaningful. I find my life now to feel quite meaningless.”

There’s a truthfulness to the admission that leaves Guts winded, and he finds himself without words. “Oh.”

The corner of Griffith’s mouth twitches up, just for a second, and Guts finds himself chasing the motion before the cold mask is abruptly slammed back down. When Griffith speaks, he does so slowly, “You’re a bad liar. You want to get close to me to kill me, don’t you?”

His cover’s been blown, but maybe he’d half-expected that. Guts remains silent. Griffith’s eyes finally meet his.

“Do you think it will be more satisfying? To betray me before you kill me, like I betrayed you?” There’s a note of something Guts can’t identify in Griffith’s voice - it’s not a tone he’s heard from him before. Guts wasn’t ever really that good at knowing just what exactly Griffith was thinking. Now, that crypticness has dropped straight into statuesque inhumanity.

“What do you think about, when you think about killing me?”

“I don’t. I don’t think about it. I have… dreams, sometimes,” Guts breathes out. Why is he even telling Griffith this?

“Dreams are a funny thing,” Griffith’s eyes are set on the ground before Guts’ feet, and when Guts foot crosses the threshold into the castle, toward the stairs where, at the top, Griffith looks down at him, he thinks Griffith seems to almost flinch. “In your dreams, how do you kill me?”

Guts doesn’t break his staring match with Griffith, and he does his best to mimic the insouciance in Griffith’s voice, “Different ways. Burning, decapitation, beating you to death… Sometimes I just stab you, like you were anyone else.”

“And am I? Just anyone else?”

Guts grits his teeth, and doesn’t answer.

“When you wake up from these dreams, what do you feel?”

Guts stops on the bottommost step, jaw clenching. He’s never thought about that much himself. Killing Griffith is a necessity, not as much a goal as the final progression of his life before death. It feels less and less like a choice he’s made and more like an unavoidable bracket closing a story. “Lots of things. Conflicted, mostly.”

“Why’s that?”

Guts inhales sharply, rising up another step, “I haven’t decided what you are yet. How much human is left.”

“You still think I could be human?”

“Why else do you keep sparing me?”

Griffith smiles, distant in a way Guts has seen before directed at nobles and soldiers around a fire, but never at himself. “Welcome back to the Band of the Hawk, Guts.”


End file.
